After the Fall
by damalur
Summary: Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you. (Loki, before and after.) - Sif/Loki, MCU.


**Notes**: Written with love for murdur in the 2013 Mischief and Mistletoe exchange.

This story is perhaps best classified as CWC: _Continuity? What continuity?_ Haha, whoops!

I owe an enormous debt to a veritable army of beta readers. Here's to misbegotten, who deserves a bottle of the finest champagne for her excellent constructive critique; to andthenisay, who waged war on my ellipses and curbed any lingering apologist tendencies; and to odylism, who put up with much gnashing and grinding of teeth through the writing and revising process, and who is in all ways the best creative partner a gal could ask for.

* * *

**After the Fall**

_The House of Crows_ / 01

* * *

He fell

for a

long

time.

At first he was aware of nothing. There was only the dark, and in the dark there was no demarcation between the dark and the being who had once called itself Loki. There was no light, and no warmth, no power here to be caught and directed, no language to break the hold of the dark, no mother or brother, no lady whose kisses were sweet as blood, no hallowed halls, no starry skies. The dark was vast, and encompassed everything, and still there was nothing in the dark.

And then slowly the creature in the dark became aware of a new sensation, and that sensation was _cold_.

Cold was, at first, a thing to be savored for its novelty; the creature in the dark had liked novel things, once upon a time, although now that which was novel carried with it a charge of fear. He turned the cold over, examined how the cold came from both without and within him; and then he sipped from his fear, and found that the fear scorched his tongue and for long moments drove away the cold; and then he began to remember why he was cold, and felt anger, and the anger left ashes in his mouth and ate the cold and the fear both, and the creature in the dark decided that he liked this anger best and would feel neither cold nor fear again.

He discovered that he was arrogant, although he did not know that arrogance was a poor substitute for self-respect.

He discovered, as the anger slid down his throat, that there was a furnace in his belly, already white with heat, and he contemplated the furnace, and how he might use it. He thought about the furnace, and the cold, and the dark, and as he thought stars were born and burned and died their solitary deaths, and galaxies whirled against the firmament, and after a time he became aware that the sky _was_ starry, that there were tiny pinpricks of light against the curtain of the dark.

Where once his primary feeling would have been one of wonder, now he had only a creeping pragmatism that demanded again, _How can I use this._

And with thought came memory, and the creature in the dark remembered his name.

* * *

When Loki was a child—as in later years—he and Thor were constant companions. One was rarely found without the other, although at times Loki found his brother's…_enthusiasm_ overwhelming and would retreat to the solace of the library. In those days Thor had not befriended the Warriors Three, and other than a parade of instructors and the children of visiting dignitaries, they had only each other and their parents for company and entertainment.

And then Thor fought the girl.

She had yellow hair, and wore piecemeal armor the parts of which were all either too small or too large for her rangy frame. Loki had seen her before, although not often; it was his habit to sit in one of the windows above the training yard and read or think as he watched Thor. She had a pattern of bullying the trainees and some of the younger soldiers into practice matches, and while she won as many play-fights as she lost, her victories and defeats alike were met with jeers and scorn. Asgard's women bore arms more often than not even in that age, but they trained in the women's yards and did not march to war with their brothers. Sif refused to wait for war to come to her.

The winter snows had barely started to drift against Asgard's walls before she persuaded good-natured Thor to play with her, and when she drew her borrowed sword and flourished it in a figure-of-eight before taking up a ready stance, Loki closed his book to watch. She fought well, but from clumsy instinct rather than experience; and when she lost—and she did lose, for she had none of Thor's training—her face burned with humiliation even as she bowed her head and bared her neck.

She had lost, but even then she did not lose easily. Loki would remember that.

Rather than laughing at her, Thor grasped her by the forearm and pulled her to her feet, and then he congratulated her in a manner that was, if overloud, transparently sincere. Her head snapped up at that, and her chin rose, and after that she was always at Thor's heels, badgering him to spar or teach her some new thing that he had himself learned at the hands of his tutors.

Loki was not overly fond of this sudden competition for his brother's attention. Sif, who he soon learned was intended to be a minister of agriculture, and who was Heimdall's half-sister besides, was so single-minded and dogged in her determination that she took notice of Loki only when he obstructed her from learning her art, and Thor was glad enough to have a companion who enjoyed martial pursuits for their own sake rather than because they were necessary. Out of desperation Loki locked himself in his chambers until he mastered a camouflage spell, and then he proceeded to spend a great deal of time lurking around corners and in shadows while he tried to determine what exactly Thor found so pleasant about this heathen girl-child.

When his effort failed, he complained to his mother. His mother, rather than banishing Sif from the palace as Loki had hoped, missed the point entirely.

"Your brother won't ever replace you, Loki," she said.

"That isn't—I wasn't—I wasn't worried about _that_," said Loki, who had not yet learned to hide his face's alarming tendency to show exactly what its owner felt. "She's crass and obnoxious and she encourages him to be an oaf. I'm only concerned for Thor, Mother."

"Concerned for Thor. I see," said Frigga.

"She broke his tooth yesterday in the yards." He slouched in his chair until his toes brushed the ground.

"His tooth? Well," said his mother, "that's fixed easily enough. Have we ever talked about teeth?" And then she taught him how to mend broken teeth or replace lost ones, how to glamor his teeth whiter or stain them dark, and how to use teeth as a substitute for bone in calling back the dead. Loki was often bored to tears by his tutors, but in his mother he found a nearly endless well of knowledge and inventiveness.

(When he was very young she had taught him to craft a duplicate of himself, and thereafter one of their favorite tricks was to leave the copy slumped over some book while the tutor droned on about his or her lesson. As Loki grew older the duplicates grew finer, until they could sigh and turn pages and take notes; and with the tutor distracted, he and his mother would sneak away, and she would show him something interesting or take him somewhere new and wonderful.)

Loki liked learning about teeth, but he still resented Sif's intrusion, and since his mother refused to do anything about the situation, and since Thor was clearly disinclined to drive Sif away of his own accord, Loki resolved to be so horrible to Sif that she would leave them alone forever.

He did this at first by hiding her equipment; he thought about ensorcelling it to fail at some critical moment, but he didn't want her _hurt_, only gone. Hiding her equipment only made her more inventive in finding substitute arms and armor, so he turned to spreading rumors about her, relaying with as innocent an expression as he could muster that it couldn't _possibly_ be true, but that he had heard one of the soldiers yesterday mention that she wasn't a girl at all—or that she'd stolen from the treasury—that she was a bastard—

And then he waited until the rumors reached Sif, and was frustrated when the whispers only made her square her shoulders, only made her lift that chin until despite her childish height it was as though she was looking down at the world, unaware that the world was looking down on _her_.

For his third act Loki sneaked into the cupboard in the stables where she sometimes recovered after a hard bout and cut off her hair as she slept. He would always remember how it felt to gather the thick sheaf of her hair, how it looked gold and yellow and white by turns in the candlelight, how with careful hands he used shears and a razor and then an uncture of his own devising on her scalp. His fingers were so light that she stirred not once from her slumber, and when he was done, and after he had collected her shorn hair in a bag, he stood back and studied her face. She had a livid bruise on one cheekbone and a cut across the side of her mouth that still bled sluggishly; Loki felt abruptly ashamed of the extremity of what he had done, and then angry at himself for the shame.

The next day she appeared at her customary time outside of Thor's quarter, her chin still carried at that arrogant angle. She was bald, of course.

Thor, who occasionally showed a flash of cunning with which Loki would not usually credit him, turned on his brother immediately—but it was Sif who laughed, Sif who stepped between them and said, "Leave him alone, Odinson. What business is it of yours how I wear my hair?"

"But you have no hair—"

"And without that obstruction to my vision, I will beat you in our play that much quicker," she said. "Truly I am grateful, for a warrior does not admit vanities until she has proven herself on the battlefield."

Thor's fists clenched again and then, slowly, fell open at his sides. "I would say you have let your lucky victory yesterday go to your head, but I can see there is nothing there—on the outside or the inside of it." He took up his hammer, then, still new enough that he had to fidget with the grip, and together he and his comrade turned to leave for the yards; but when Thor's back was turned, Sif bared her teeth at Loki, like a wolf-cub caught in a trap.

He bared his teeth in return, and thought, as he watched her go, that they had reached an understanding.

* * *

Loki. His name was Loki.

And with his name came the sensations of the body: He no longer existed in the proper amount of dimensions, was twisted and splayed so that he might look at his own ribs, curving white against and above and below his skin. Below his ribs, just there, were his lungs; he saw them from within and without, although he did not draw breath, and nestled against his breastbone was his heart, which changed vectors with every pulse.

He saw into himself.

He saw his own eyes, and how they changed—one beat blue, the next green, the next red by turns. He saw his hands and the fine bones of his hands and the tendons and muscles that drove those hands, and if he had not walked his own paths between worlds before the sight would have unmade him. As it was, he looked for a long time, to understand the parts of the whole and how they might be made whole again.

And then did Loki began to put himself back together.

* * *

The season had turned and still Sif was bald as a nut, joyful or content to seem so, growing stronger every day. Loki was astonished that she had never confronted him, even more astonished that she hadn't publicly accused him; she had to know who had stolen her hair, and why. She was not stupid, and for that reason he did his best to avoid being alone with her. This was not difficult, for Thor was with them always—

Until one day early in winter, when Loki came across her reading in the library.

Even early in winter the days were short, the nights cold, and although the Shining City was to Loki's mind even more beautiful wrapped in twilight, her streets illuminated by candle and lamp while snow fell softly from the starry sky, Asgard's people were more interested in using the weather as reason to feast with even greater merriment than usual. Loki, who tired quickly of crowds when he was required to be at the center of them, habitually begged an early release from his mother and would retire to read. Even Asgard's librarian was absent on those long winter evenings, and with the library to himself Loki was free to explore texts from which he was more normally discouraged.

He almost sat on her. She was curled in a deep chair by the fire in one of the smaller antechambers, and while she was not reading, there was a pile of books on the table beside her, one of them still opened to an old Korbonite epic. There were tear tracks on her face.

"Are you crying?" Loki asked.

"I am not!" Sif said.

Loki set his own books by the chair opposite her and said, "I'm sorry, I must be mistaken. I've never seen it rain inside the library before, but then Thor comes here so rarely—"

She snarled at him. Her face was flushed, her lashes thick with moisture, but her skull looked fine-boned in the half-light, and the skin stretched over it very thin. "Is this about your hair?" Loki said.

"It's not about my thrice-damned hair," Sif snapped. "I don't care about stupid hair, but if you do that to me ever again I'll...I'll _bite you_."

"I could pluck out your eyelashes, I suppose," he said, doubtfully, "but that seems like more trouble than it's worth. If this isn't about your hair, then why are you crying? I've never seen you cry."

"I'm not crying," she said.

"Then why are you _not_ crying?"

"Because there's nobody here like me!"

"_Oh,_" said Loki.

There was nothing to say. Loki, although not so gallant as Sif, felt a harmony for her that inspired the meagre courtesy of turning away from her fresh tears. He turned through an atlas of Vanaheim while she did her best to muffle her sobs, and while he looked at the pages, he neither saw nor comprehended. After a time her heaving faded.

"What are you reading?" she said.

"An atlas," he said, and then, wondering if it would impress her, added, "And a spellbook on shapeshifting."

"Shapeshifting is impossible. Only people in stories do that."

"Oh? And how do you know?"

"My brother told me," she said. "He knows everything."

"And mine knows nothing. Perhaps if we put them together we can have one sibling with both common sense and humility."

She snorted, and looked angry with herself for snorting. "You shouldn't tease Thor so," she said.

"Why not? He teases me. And anyway, he's _my_ brother—you wouldn't understand, Heimdall's too old."

"He's not stupid. Not really. He just—"

"Doesn't think. Yes, I know." He turned in his chair and pulled his legs up, so it was not so obvious that he wasn't tall enough to set his feet on the floor. Sif was taller than he was; small compensation that she was taller than Thor, too. Someday, Loki thought, he would be tall like his father—like his mother—perhaps even like Tyr, who had the great barrel chest of an ox and whose helm brushed the tops of most doors.

"I should leave," Sif said.

Loki reached behind him and swapped the atlas for a grimoire. "Stay if you like," he finally said. "It's of no concern to me."

"Very well," said Sif, who did not thank him. She took up her own book, although she did not read it, choosing instead to stare out the tall, narrow windows interrupting the procession of bookcases lining the room. The snow was still falling, and harder now, so thick that the sky seemed a solid whirl of white. Loki stole glances at her, careful for no reason he could name not to be caught, and as he watched he saw her shiver.

If the library was cold, though, he did not feel it; if the winter seeped warmth from the world, what concern was it of his?

* * *

And in the rift, Loki, who had qualities resembling thought and form and name, altered his course. He could not stop his fall, but he found he could change the direction he was falling, and in time his new course would carry him to a jump-gate of the Aerie, one long abandoned that now orbited a dying star.

His fall now had direction and purpose; but it was a long fall, even so. For the lifespan of a mortal he did not draw breath, did not speak, did nothing but tend the molten furnace behind his heart and dream the long dreams of a creature not living but not yet dead. In his dreams he saw Asgard as he had seen her through a child's eyes; her towers stretched the skies, her ramparts reached from sea to stars, and from the palace, just there, his own window issued a tiding of magpies, seven in all...

In his dreams he saw Asgard, but with his waking eyes he saw the void, and he remembered how Odin—shield-shaker, battle-blinder—had cast him out, how Thor at his father's behest had flung Loki from the Rainbow Bridge and had watched, uncaring, as his brother—

And how so? _Had_ Thor thrown him? Loki remembered it, could feel his brother's phantom hands grasping his cloak as Thor forced the usurper off the edge; Odin's sneer had turned grimly gleeful as he watched his foster-son die. There was, however, a strange persistence in Loki's mind to the image of his own hand releasing from the haft of Gungnir—

Of course there was. He killed himself; he needed no other to do his work for him. It was a _choice_, born not of desperation but of defiance. Or was it shame? Was it pride? Was it, in the end, despair that had caused Loki to slip his grasp—?

No matter. These were only dreams, shadows sent by the void to distract him from his purpose; Loki knew what had transpired, and he knew that the one he had called brother had thrown him from the Bifrost like some broken relic fit only to be discarded. They were only dreams, and they had no power over him.

And still he woke and slept and dreamed and woke again, until there was no difference between the waking and the dreaming, until he thought he would go mad from the solitude of it all.

* * *

One day Loki realized he had been mistaken all along, and that Sif was not a rival but an ally.

She was bald still, although she had managed to scrounge some armor that almost fit her from one of Asgard's many vaults, and Thor's instructors no longer looked at her askance when she showed up to Thor's lessons.

(Loki had wondered why she never bothered to invite herself to his own lesson, for if he was not the jolly terror of the play-yard that Thor was, he was still a son of Odin, and skilled in his own ways. But then—Loki preferred to hold his practices at dusk, when the soldiers were gorging themselves, or at dawn, before any had bothered to rise other than whatever poor creature was assigned to tutor Asgard's younger prince in warfare for the current season.)

Like his brother, Thor was fond of long rambles through the woods and mountains that hemmed against the Deeper Falls, and while he would sometimes take a cohort or two—Loki, most often, or Sif, or more recently a youth named Fandral—he would sometimes vanish into the forest on his own, with only his great hammer and perhaps one or both of his goats for company. He did this most often when stormclouds gathered in the north, rolling low over the world, but dutiful as he was, he never failed to leave word when he was spending the day in the wild. If he did not wish to be bothered, however, it was only with Loki that he would share his plans, for Loki would neither fuss over his safety nor reprimand him for faltering in his duties. As a man, even as an adolescent, he would have the freedom he so keenly desired, but he could not yet even grow a beard. In those days, Thor preferred to seek forgiveness rather than permission.

There came a day when Thor did not come home.

Loki hadn't noticed his brother's absence at first; he'd found a puzzle-box the day before in a room off the library's second sub-basement, one that required a maddening combination of magic and logic—two methods that were more closely wedded than the most learned Aesir cared to admit, yet not so closely wedded that their union was easy. By supper time the box was still refusing to yield, and so he took it with him and fiddled with the pressure-points and spell-locks while his parents argued policy over their meal. Every so often his mother would pause to admonish him—"Eat, Loki, you never eat enough"—but Loki passed the evening in his own blissful realm.

When he looked up and blinked, he was not in the dining hall but rather the chamber shared between his and Thor's quarters, a place littered with discarded clothes, maps, bits and bobs, old toys and newer fineries, here a bird's nest and there the pelt of an enfield. Thor liked to play strategy games in the evenings, and Loki would often indulge him; they were an even enough match for one another...but that evening, Thor was absent.

And Loki realized it had been nearly a full day since he had seen his brother.

And Loki remembered Thor, that morning, mentioning something about hunting—

And Loki said, "Fuck."

He was digging frantically through the debris surrounding his desk when Sif found him. He'd need his knives, and a light, and a cloak; he had some idea of the direction Thor _might_ have gone, but if that oaf made his brother tramp across half the land because he'd forgotten the time and fallen asleep, Loki was going to carve out Thor's sweetbreads and serve them at their father's next feast.

"Thank the skies," Sif said. "You're going for him, aren't you?"

Loki paused in the act of slipping a knife up his sleeve and said, "He's only lost. It's no reason for worry." When that didn't move her from the threshold, he clarified: "That means you can leave. Go on."

"I'm coming with you."

"No," Loki said. "No, you most definitely are not." He snatched up a map and a hobby lantern. Fury made his fingers quick rather than clumsy; other Aesir had to have that trait trained out of them, but Loki had been born nimble.

"Yes," Sif said. "I am. I've earned that much."

"You've earned nothing—"

"I have," Sif said. "And besides, we haven't time to argue."

Loki snarled at her and she, high-born lady that she was, snarled back.

"Fine!" said Loki. "Fine. On your own head be it."

Sif lifted her brows and drew back her red cloak just enough to reveal the hilt of the sword girded through her belt.

"Well," Loki decided. "I suppose you might be of some use. Come now, fair maid."

"Call me that again and I'll box your ears," she said, but Loki hushed her, and she followed him quietly enough. They dodged through the palace and out a side exit, an easy task for two who made a game of adventure, but when they reached the city streets Sif went again to slink through the shadows. Loki halted her with one hand on her sturdy shoulder.

"No. Like this," he said, and drew the hood of his cloak over his face so that his eyes were cast in shadow but his mouth and chin were clear—just a boy, cold, running some mother's errand. "Look like you belong, and they won't notice you."

She nodded to show her understanding, and then they strolled north and east and north again, until the city's cobbled streets gave way to beaten paths and then to true trails. Only Bil showed her face that night; Asgard's other moons, shy in the winter seasons, had drifted far on the Sea of Space.

When they reached the foothills of the Carousel Mountains, though, Sif froze as if caught in the gaze of an all-seeing father.

"Do you know the path?" she asked.

Loki threw back his hood. "Why ask now?"

"Because," she said. "We've been following Thor's trail to this point, but look—" She went back down the path, and under a yew tree showed him an impression in the dirt. "His boot," she said, and then she pointed to a crushed night-bloom, so small that Loki's eyes would have passed it over in the dim moonlight. "He went here, off the path"—she led him a little ways off the trail, beyond the yew—"this way"—she reached up and plucked a golden hair from a low branch—"and in haste."

Loki took the hair from her and examined it. "To whence did he continue?"

"In the same direction," she said. "Tell me, prince, could your pride stand to follow behind a fair maid?"

"Fair or foul, there is not much my pride cannot withstand," he said, and although he _did_ in truth fret for his brother, he still flashed his teeth at her. "You will find my hubris hardier even than the maid's spear-arm."

She snorted at him in a most endearingly unladylike manner. "I find it hard to believe that they call you sweet of tongue."

"My sweet tongue is all the more savory for its rareness," Loki remarked. "Lead on, Lady Sif."

In the woods she was nearly as fleet of foot as he, and far less clumsy than Thor—although, Loki supposed, if one had the stamina and the canniness to run a quarry to ground, one didn't need to move lightly. Sometimes he wondered if he and Thor shared blood at all. Of course, he would hardly feel half so frantic, nor half so moved, to rescue anyone who was not his relation.

They must have walked another half a league, and this time over more difficult ground; the soft carpet of leaves and moss now and then gave way to scrabble or stone, and twice they had to help each other over fallen logs as tall as Tyr himself. Now more than ever Loki appreciated Sif's keen senses; really it had been a marvelous idea to invite her along. She never seemed to walk into the cobwebs that grew ever more frequent, either, and soon Loki learned to duck when she ducked, to place his feet in her steps.

And then beneath the burble of a hidden brook, the rustle of leaves, the chirp of crane-bugs, the eerie murmur of the marsh-lights, there came a chattering, a clacking and a hissing, and as if possessed of one mind Loki and Sif threw themselves over an embankment and pressed into the shadow of the overhang.

"_What_ is—" Sif breathed, and Loki slapped his hand over her mouth and held a finger to his lips. Her eyes were wide and liquid, and when he knew she would stay still, he crept to his feet and peered around the trees in whose roots they had taken shelter.

He saw her legs first, one and then another and then a third, probing ahead of her, patting the ground as she mused, and then the bulk of her dark body, glossy, even sleek; and then he saw her mandibles, and her eight eyes. Suspended by two of her legs beneath her belly, in a cocoon so encompassing that only the yellow shock of his hair showed, was Loki's fool of a brother.

Loki could not breathe for the danger of it.

Beside him, Sif trembled; she had not stayed still but had doubled the risk of reveal, and he could feel her quivering, from eagerness or fear or both. They did not move, did not speak, dared not _think_ for the nearness of the beast, but after a moment of contemplation, during which her long limbs combed over the forest floor, she stirred and skittered away—if so large a monster could be said to _skitter_.

"_Odin's gaping eye socket,_" Sif swore.

"Give me your hand," Loki said, and when she did not offer it, pried her fingers from the hilt of her sword and uncurled them. He drew his dagger with the hand that did not hold hers, and when she reared away he said, "Hold _still_."

"Loki, what are you doing?"

"It's camouflage," he said. "Now be still, we don't have much time. I doubt her path will carry her far, but we cannot risk—"

"Why do you—oh, the webs," Sif said, and then jerked when he began to carve a rune into her palm.

"More and more of them," he agreed. "We may have been following her trail and not my brother's."

"I'm a better tracker than that," she said; their argument to this point had been carried out in hisses and whispers, but her voice rose almost to a shout in indignance.

Loki ignored her and took the knife to his own hand; a nick was enough to draw out the symbol he needed, one he'd added to his repertoire long enough ago, but he'd forgotten to clean the dagger and so Sif's blood mingled with his own. It shouldn't make a difference. He hoped; blood was tricky.

"This will muffle our steps and blur our figures, but we are not invisible. Do you understand?" he asked.

"Why didn't we use this before?"

"I'm not as eager to bleed as you," he said. "Stealth over speed, do you understand?"

She graced him with a look of such scorn that he would swear that his skin blistered. "Do _you?_"

And so the monster led, and they followed. They followed her through the forest, over brooks and logs and mossy boulders sunk between trees in such a way that Sif and Loki were forced to either scramble over the stone or climb into the canopy, and the webbing now was strung in their path more often than not, and the strands were thicker, and soon the webs had structure and size and, soon enough, victims, bones or scalps with hair attached, and then the bones had flesh, and then the bones were true corpses, people except for the decay and rot that peeled the skin from their cheeks to reveal their teeth.

Loki wondered why nobody had killed this spider of size yet, and then he began to wonder what kind of creature could live in Odin's shadow long enough to amass so many victims.

At length they drew close to a clearing, one so ringed with cobwebs that it glinted silver and milky white. The monster dropped her burden at the mouth of a cave and then set to quick work, binding Thor more tightly and then suspending him from the cave's mouth. There was enough light from the moon and the marsh-lights that they could watch her spin each tendril of Thor's prison. When she was finished, she climbed over him and up the rocky face that led higher still into the hills beyond.

As soon as the monster was out of sight, Sif bolted. Loki was ready for her; he caught her by the shoulder, yanked her back, and threw himself on top of her.

"_Stop_," he hissed. "We should go back and fetch help. We know where he is, we can call for the hall-troop and return with torches—"

"He might be suffocating!" Sif said. Her speech was muffled, perhaps because Loki was shoving her face against the dirt in his effort to hold her.

"We can't rush in without a plan," he said. "You know this, Sif, think."

She ceased her struggle, and after a heartbeat Loki felt her go limp. He rolled to his knees and she rose to join him and then they sat, looking at one another, both trying to disguise their desperation and neither succeeding.

"We can't go back for help," Sif said. "We don't have the time. She'll be back soon, you know she will, and who knows how long Thor will have then?"

"Well, we aren't going to fight it!"

"Why not?" said Sif. Her color was high, and her hand was again at her sword—did it indeed ever leave? "The two of us together—"

"Are children," Loki finished.

"Children, yes, but future warriors of Asgard!"

"_I_ am not a future _anything_. I would like someday to be the future Loki, but if we fling ourselves into battle against an obviously superior foe, I won't a chance of even that. Did you not see the spears at the feet of those bodies, and the helms that once sat on their heads? This is not a monster who harvests only the weak!"

"Then would you have us run snivelling to our mothers?" Sif demanded. "You may be a coward, but I will not abandon a friend in peril—"

Loki, whose temper did not often run hot, felt a chill overtake him. It started in his heart from a seed of ice, and like a cold torrent it swept through his veins.

"Be quiet," he said.

"We have to—"

"Be quiet," he said again. "I am thinking."

Sif frowned, ill-will gathering like a storm on her face, but she let him be. If Loki concentrated and called up the second sight that let him see the thin filaments of light that fell across the world like a net—like webbing—he could see his concealment settled over her like a cloak of shining gold, far brighter than any spear or mallet ever wrought by Odin and his dwarves. He brushed his fingers over her cheek, settling the cloak more firmly over her, and the edges of her face began to blur.

"We have no chance in open contest," he said, "but perhaps with a little skill, we can try our hand at trickery. There is no spell I know that can bind our foe for long, but I think illusion will do just as well. You must cut Thor down first, do you understand? I'll keep you cloaked for as long as I can, but if my concentration wavers, take Thor and run. Follow the brook—it will lead you to the seashore, and she won't follow you on open water."

"You said your spell would _not_ make us invisible—"

"Yes, yes, you're going to need a distraction. Here, take this." He passed her his knife hilt-first. "We'll meet at the overhang where we hid before. Be ready."

"What kind of distraction?" she said, or started to say; but Loki was already on his feet and, with all the dignity of a prince of Asgard, he strolled into the clearing.

He kept his hands clasped behind his back, fingers tangled in a knot to hide how he shook, as he inspected first the carcass draped over an outcrop of rock and then the bundle at the mouth of the cave. Here he tilted his head, a connoisseur judging the work of a fellow craftsman, and after he completed his study he paced a half-circle skirting the tree line; opposite the cave, some ten yards from where his brother hung, the artist had woven another work, this one of far greater intricacy. Not a web to climb or capture, but perhaps...a windbreak, Loki decided. Yes, a windbreak would make sense; the cavern opened to the west, and during the storm season the winds would blow straight into the creature's lair.

Behind him sounded a chittering, a chattering, the clacking anticipation of a cold predator ravenous with her hunger. Loki continued to present his back, and thought with his forebrain that her cave must not be so very deep and with his hindbrain wished desperately that Sif would be quick at her work.

"I like what you've done with the skulls," he said aloud. "They do add a certain macabre elegance, although your weft is clumsy, just here." He set a finger against the mesh and found it dry like spun steel and fine like shadow.

Her mandibles clicked once, twice, thrice, and then she said, "And whaaaaat do you know of weaving, infaaant?" Her voice, such as it was, sounded hoarse, as though she'd screamed so long and loud that she could scream no more, and she spoke with the cadence of a creature trying to remember a second or third language.

Loki arranged his features before he turned, that she might see first his teeth and then understand him to be grinning. "Why, mistress, I can weave a web so sure and fast that it can bear the weight of worlds, and the stretch and strain would only improve the beauty. What is a mere spider's web against that which the Norns envy?"

A marsh-light darted from the shadows to hover beneath her nightmare face, and her small round eyes glinted darkly, hinting at no feeling at all. "The Nornssss. We remember the Norns, oh yesss, Norrrn. Say why they three would envy an infaaaant."

Over the monster's bulbous abdomen Loki caught a flash, as of a knife in motion, but he didn't look for fear of drawing attention to it. "The latest addition to your collection," he said. "A pretty lad, yes? I know him well, for he was born balder than one of your eggs—begging your mistress's pardon—and his father commissioned me to weave a head of hair for his son."

"Ohhhhh?" said the monster. "No skill, we thiiinnnk, to stitch straw to the head of a peasant boy."

He would need surprise. "A peasant? I am offended. The boy is Odin's son. A craftswoman such as yourself is surely so occupied with her loom that the affairs of the realm are of little concern, but even in this dark corner of the land you have heard of Odin."

"All knowsss Odin," she acknowledged.

"Then you know that my work must be of the highest order to win royal patronage. Why, I think I have—yes, here is a sample of my work." He drew the strand of Thor's hair Sif had found on the trail from his pocket and held it up for inspection; to his great surprise, his hands held steady.

"Spinningsss, hrn. We will see it." She plucked it from his fingers as neatly as he would pluck a blade of grass, holding it between the folded end joints of one spindling leg. "Good spinnings, but no loomwork."

"We are not all so fortunate as to carry spinning wheel and loom both within us, gracious mistress," Loki said. "Is that not why I came to you? Odin's son is almost of age, and would like a beard to match his now-full head, but a beard, I think you will agree, is tricky work, and if you would help me, I would share with you Odin's reward."

"Share spinningsss," the monster said. "Or we kill you and take the prize ourself, yessss?"

Loki shrugged. "If you wish," he said, and turned away again. He was started to lose his hold on Sif; the strain of keeping her concealed had nearly sapped his reserves. "Of course, if you do…"

"If we doooo...?"

"Well, you won't know what fiber I used for the hair, of course," said Loki. "Odin would like a matched set, so that his son doesn't resemble a patchwork. Better to keep me alive for now."

"Odin doessss not like uss," she agreed. "Odin should not hear of ussss…" Something brushed the back of his neck; Loki's eyes fell shut. Sif had slipped from his grasp entirely, and he hoped it was because she was far out of reach…

He ducked and took three steps back, bowing below her head and two of her legs, and said, "Odin would forgive a—ah, a lady many transgressions, were she to do a favor for his heir," he said. "And there are meats served at the feasts of Asgard that would inspire songs, so tender and juicy are they, so succulent and warm…"

"Perhapsss we eat you now," she said.

"Mistress, if you are going to eat me," Loki said, "why would you waste the meal? You already have your dinner; do this thing for me, and if you are unhappy with your reward—you may eat me then."

"Mmm...perhapsss," the monster said. She was close enough now that Loki could count the thick, short bristles on her. "Perhapsss…"

He inhaled—

—and the point of a sword exploded through the creature's face, shearing to a stop a hair's breadth from Loki's face; it reversed, and Sif, who straddled her prey, tore her weapon free and took off the great spider's head.

Loki exhaled, centered himself, and began to mop black ichor from his face.

"That," he said, "was monumentally stupid."

Sif stopped hacking long enough to glare. "You didn't tell me _you_ were the distraction—and anyway, I saved your life."

"If you like. Where's Thor?"

"In the cave. I gave him the knife," she added. She seemed to go slack all at once; her sword fell from her grasp, and then she sat down, hard. Loki let his knees give out as well. His head was buzzing, and his joints seemed as though they weren't functioning properly.

"We did it," said Sif.

"If you like," Loki said again, but when she wiped sweat and ichor from her head and laughed, he laughed with her like a shout, glad and trembling.

* * *

The elliptic of his fall carried Loki between the stars. He had walked such paths before, under his own power, and knew the secret ways better even than the guardian of the Rainbow Bridge, which could carry man and god alike everywhere in this universe and many places in others, but between the stars were dark spots where none had ever walked, and in those dark spots dwelled the real monsters.

Loki had thought he had known horror, had thought he had known deception, thought he knew ugliness and grandeur and power, but what slept behind the current of Odin's reality was more vast and terrible still. He could feel the eyes of their minds upon him, although no matter how he twisted he never caught more than the glimpse of a titanic bulk shifting; but the weight of that regard was enough to drive him back to the childhood prayers that mothers recited over their children's cradles.

And now for the first time he wondered if Frigga had such prayers over him. He had taken it as a precept of faith that she had, but what Loki was becoming had little use for faith, and beneath the blind regard of the oldest gods his last flickers of even this were extinguished.

There was the dark, and there were creatures who lived in the dark, ancient even by Odin's reckoning, beyond the ken of gods and men. Loki, who had been called monster, who had been born of monsters and raised only as a sacrifice against the dark, felt quite at home.

He carried the heavy weight of their attention with him after that, though, for some things once learned cannot be unlearned, and what Loki learned of the giants who slumber beyond the end of the universe was also in his own, personal universe the end of hope. The veil of life was a fragile thing in comparison.

* * *

Their deed was not memorialized in tale or song, for Sif and Loki and Thor concurred that the slaying of the spider was a secret best kept among they three, at least for the time, but nor was it without consequences. The first was that Loki went to his mother and said to her, "Mother."

"Yes, my love?" She had a cloak spread across her lap as she sat on the queen's balcony, and into the cloak she was working with needlepoint a set of runes. Loki recognized the symbols his father had carried back from the World Tree long ago, although he did not know the meaning of all of them, and he recognized more of his mother's craft, the sigils she had brought with her from Vanaheim and the sigils that had been revealed to her during her own studies. Odin had his runes and did not desire more, but Frigga kept her own secrets and the secrets of those long dead besides.

"You know more than anyone I have ever met, Mother."

"I will take that as a compliment, although you have not met so very many people. Don't repeat it to your father." Her needle flashed in the sunlight.

"I would like to learn from you," Loki said, and then added, so she would not misunderstand him, "That is, I request an apprenticeship."

Her needle slowed. "And what prompted this request? You know I am happy to share my knowledge with you, Loki, but I haven't had an apprentice since—long before you were born."

Here was the part that was difficult to admit, but Loki could think of no other way to convince her. "Father is a great warrior," he said. "As is Thor. As is Sif."

"We all have our own gifts—"

"I will never be a warrior, Mother," he said. "I have no _desire_ to be a warrior, but a warrior is what Father expects his son to be."

"You aren't unskilled, my love, but no, I have never felt that soldiering was your fate. There are other ways to serve."

"There are—and a warrior I am not, but I know well enough that there will always be wars. My brother and I, we are instructed by the men-at-arms, but while they may teach to Thor's strengths, they will not teach to mine, if indeed they are willing to believe I have any. I've seen you fight—you can teach me what I want to know."

"And what is that?"

"How to be fast," Loki said. "How to be nimble. How to outthink my foe. How to move unseen. How to use magic on the battlefield and wage war in the courtroom. How to win."

"I can teach you all of these things," Frigga acknowledged. "I can even teach you to play to your greatest strength. As for lesser strengths—I will give you those."

"My greatest strength." Loki was bemused by this idea; he had always thought of himself as skilled, but not _strong_, not in the way his family was strong. "What can you teach me of that?"

Frigga smiled at him and said, "How to be unpredictable, my love."

And so did Loki, Prince of Asgard, start his formal education.

The second consequence took longer in the planning; Loki started by pouring over the golden spool of Sif's hair. He hadn't yet bothered to discard the heavy coil, and now he was glad for his slovenliness, because her old hair would have to serve as pattern for the new. The trick was to make it enduring; Loki could create the illusion of hair, could even change something else into hair, but after—oh, after a handful of centuries, the spell would have to be renewed. And it would not _grow_ on its own, not unless Loki found a way to enchant beanstalks to look like hair. She didn't really seem to mind her baldness, did she? She had her head jammed into a warrior's helm half the time anyway...

Loki sighed and opened his atlas and began to learn the paths to Nidavellir.

This he had to plan carefully; there was no time for a journey on foot, so he'd half to take one of the gleaming short-paths that linked the worlds, and ideally one that would land him in the middle of the dwarves' hive-kingdom. They lived below the ground, close the molten fires that lit their forges hotter than those of any other smiths—and if Loki Odinson asked for a favor, he would ask no other than King Eitri himself, Eitri who had crafted Thor's hammer at Odin's bidding.

He took with him a cask of mead and a cloak from his mother's loom and a lump of star-stuff, as gifts that the dwarves might answer his request, and rode out under the cover of night, while the rest of Asgard slumbered the restful sleep of heroes, and when he reached the crack of rock that opened the breach he hobbled his horse and loaded his gifts into a bundle on his own back. The crack was narrow, so narrow that Loki was grateful for the first time for his slenderness, and he lingered for a while at the mouth of it, doubtful. It looked like nothing more than a fissure, barely large enough for a boy to squeeze inside while playing hide-and-go-seek, but it had the right _feel_ to it. Loki could not explain his seventh sense, except to say that he had always had it, but Frigga said his senses and his dedication would someday make him a great sorcerer.

And so went Loki into the crack between worlds.

He had done this before. In the library's third basement there was a door that opened in the middle of a cliff-face overlooking the endless sands of the Tessellate Desert, which lay thousands of leagues to the northwest of the Golden City, and in a small room off the Hall of Music was a wardrobe that would carry a traveller to Everwinter if he was patient enough to wait; but both of these lands were under Odin's rule, and Nidavellir, although technically beholden to Odin's throne, was a nation unto itself. Better to say—he had not done _precisely_ this before, although he had done something like it.

When he squeezed into the fissure there was at first only a feeling of coldness, although he could feel the warm breeze off the sea-lanes blowing at his back, and then there was darkness, although Loki forced his eyes to stay open, and then, at last, he stumbled, only when he threw out his arms to catch himself there was nothing to catch himself _against_...

And then he fell. It was nothing like travelling the Rainbow Bridge, which held a voyager as solidly as the rocks beneath held Asgard. Here there was only a vast emptiness, and no matter how Loki twisted he found no handholds, no surface against which to scrabble for purchase, no ground nor even the remembrance of a sky. Everything was sky, and beneath that, Loki was nothing.

He landed hard and took the impact on his hands and knees; he could feel his palms were wet with blood and packed with gravel, and busy with taking hard breaths against the pain, it took him a moment to realize his eyes were seeing shapes and not the endless black of before.

Before him was a smith's circle, and in it a smith, and behind was a heat so thick as to suffocate.

"Well," said the smith, who was Eitri himself; Loki remembered him from the day he'd presented Mjolnir to Thor. "I've seen my forge spit out many things, but this is the first time it's spit out a prince."

Loki bolted to his feet. The action sent another sharp pain lancing up his arms, and he realized his hands were not only scraped but singed besides. There was a smear of soot that curled around his wrist and vanished up his sleeve; he curled his fingers down and did not wince.

"King Eitri," he said.

"Loki Odinson," the king said. "Maybe I should call you Loki Friggason, huh? I hear you're clinging to her skirts still."

"I am my mistress's pupil," Loki agreed. "I had not, however, known there was any shame in learning her art. She will be...surprised...to hear of it."

Eitri scowled and spat to the side. "And what does Frigga's boy want with us, huh?"

"I wish to buy your services," Loki said.

"Oh yeah?" The king set aside the great black hammer he'd been gripping in one gnarled hand. He was as tall as Loki but half again as wide, his arms knotted with muscle, his fingers and knuckles spattered with the scars of old burns. "Better be good payment, to buy Eitri's make the way a man buys a pair of boots."

"I bring a cloak from my mother's loom, and the metal of a star's heart, and here—this cask of mead from Odin's cellar." The mead was heavy, and sloshed a little when Loki drew it forth and erased the spell that had made it small enough to carry. His father wouldn't miss one cask; the cellar of Asgard stretched for miles beneath the city, and even Loki and Thor had not reached its terminal wall.

"The mead's all right," Eitri said. "That other stuff—well, I guess I can always use metal. So, infant prince, we'll do business. What is it you want?"

Loki took out the last bundle in his bag and unwrapped it to reveal the thick coil of Sif's hair. "I need new hair," he said. "Something that will replace this. There are...certain reasons that the old owner can no longer grow hair herself, and I seek a replacement of fine craftsmanship."

"Hair, huh? You ask the King of Nidavellir to make _hair_? I made Odin's spear Gungnir, boy, and the hammer Mjolnir, and before that I wrought for Bor Odin's father. I have made armor that will hold until the end of the Nine Realms and swords that the bards name in songs—all of them, boy, Eitri doesn't make swords that won't be called Dragonsbane or Heartbreaker or the like—and you want me to make _hair?_"

"Yes," said Loki, who was no longer sure such confidence was warranted but wasn't sure of what his response should be, either.

The king heaved a sigh even his bellows couldn't match and said, "Let's see it, then." Loki held out the coil for his inspection; it was bound at both ends and twisted so tightly around itself that it looked more like the gilt braiding on a ceremonial breastplate than something so common as hair, and surely that would catch the king's interest. When Eitri reached out to touch it, though, Loki snatched it away out of instinct. The king laughed.

"So that's how it is, huh? Who's it for, boy?"

"That's no business of yours," Loki said. "Can you do it?"

"You insult me by asking." Eitri turned to his anvil again in a clear dismissal, and Loki, who did not like being dismissed but was nevertheless used to it, tucked Sif's golden hair away. "Get out of here. It'll be done in twelve days' time if you bring me more of that mead when you come to pick it up."

"Very well," said Loki. "You have my thanks for your skill...and your discretion."

"Your thanks are worth shit. Didn't I tell you to leave?"

"So you did," said Loki, and, hoping his fear was hidden and that the pain of this would be worth its impressiveness, stepped backward into the fire. He fell back to Asgard and was coughing hard from the smoke when he landed; his hands ached, and his pride stung, but the thing had been done.

After, he still had to sneak into his chambers; Thor could be a surprisingly light sleeper, at least if he hadn't thieved a flagon of beer at supper, and Loki was beginning to reconsider the advantage of having his brother near against the ease of having his privacy. Thor slept on tonight, though, or if he woke he did not seek out Loki, and Loki was free to clean and bind his hands and snatch a few hours of sleep himself. The next morning, when he reported to his mother, he asked her to show him a healing spell or two.

She seemed surprised. "You've never shown much of an interest in medicine," she said.

"I fell in the woods yesterday," he bluffed, and showed her the bandages. "And anyway, Thor is always getting himself clobbered upside the head; someone ought to know how to put him back together when he finally fractures his skull. It's coming, Mother, wait and see—someday he'll say the wrong thing to the wrong ambassador's son, and then we shall have Thor no more." Loki shook his head, mockingly derisive.

"Yes," Frigga said, "it is certainly _Thor's_ sharp tongue we should fear." But she showed him anyway, although as with many of his lessons this required more background than Loki had anticipated. By the time Sif's new hair was ready he could name all the bones in the body, and the muscles, and sketch them from memory; he knew how to regrow tissue, a job that proved much easier in his own body than in another's, and how to encourage a fracture to heal, and how to cut off the flow of blood, and how to draw out a simple poison. They were working on more complex toxins, but this required a deeper knowledge of antidotes than Loki currently possessed, and it would be at least another season or two of study before Frigga thought he would be ready to test his ability.

The twelfth night fell, and again Loki stole away in the night, this time carrying two casks of Asgardian mead. Again he went through the crack between worlds, and again Eitri's fires spit him out. The king was there, eating leg-of-lamb and roasted apples from a platter balanced on his anvil. He didn't stir at Loki's appearance, merely continued to chew his lamb, so Loki drew forth the mead and set it in front of the king and bowed—respectfully, but not so low as to seem Eitri's inferior.

"Well, boy," the king said, and mopped at his lips with his long beard. "Here for your hair, huh?"

"If it please Your Highness."

There was a grim sort of smile on the king's mouth. "I have it here," he said, and lifted a small bundle wrapped in white cloth from the rack of tools and swords and half-finished arms that sat in his smithy. From far away Loki heard other voices—other dwarves—but he could not see them in the darkness. Off to the left were flickers of orange that might be torches, but the inside of the cavern was so far above his head he could not even feel it looming, and it seemed like all light and all heat came only from Eitri's forge.

Eitri had to step around the casks to hand the bundle to Loki; Loki received it with both hands and simply held it for a moment, weighing the heft of it, before he unfastened the white cloth and looked within.

There was hair there, a long double handful of it, and the ends sparked like flint striking, but the hair was not golden—it was black, blacker than ash, blacker than night, so dark that it reflected no light at all.

When Loki lifted his eyes, Eitri began to laugh, and so Loki cried out, "You deceived me!"

The king laughed all the harder, until he had to wipe tears from his eyes, and Loki clutched at the hair as he fought against his anger. When Eitri had finally contained himself, he said, "Something wrong, huh?"

"This isn't what we agreed," Loki snarled. "I have paid you in full and in good faith, and this—_this_ is what you give me?"

"I told you, boy, I make swords. You come here with all your fancies and make an order like Odin himself, what did you expect? Should've asked your mother to weave you some hair, maybe. At least I got some use out of that lump of rock you brought me—didn't have to waste good steel for a prince's finery."

Loki looked at Eitri, and then he looked at the hair, at Sif's hair, and he wrapped it back up and stowed it carefully inside his coat; and when it was safe, he let the air harden his boots and kicked at the first casket of mead. It split open with a thundering crack, and honey wine spilled over Eitri's smith-circle. Loki turned and kicked the second cask; this one held whole, but the force of his kick sent it spinning out into the dark, and Loki heard it hit some far-off rock and splatter.

"You—!" Eitri roared.

"Yes," said Loki. "Me." And then he took his hair and left Nidavellir; he heard the king spitting curses all the way home, all the way to Asgard, but he knew Eitri would not go to Odin, because then Eitri would face censure for his falseness. Eitri liked to see his arms used, and no one used arms like the Aesir.

Sif found him the next morning; it was her habit to join Loki and Thor for breakfast. She often arrived flushed with sweat from running through the woods to strengthen her legs, and since they had made their peace Loki would tease that she slept out under the moons because she had a fear of the indoors. Today, with a touch of gentle encouragement, Thor decided to take the morning meal with his mother, and as soon as he was gone Loki pushed the plates and cups out of the way and unfurled his soot-smeared bundled on the table. The hair still sparked at the ends, but it was less alien and more fascinating in the daylight. Sif tilted her head and looked at him questioningly.

"I thought you might want a replacement," Loki said. "After the...unfortunate accident that befell your scalp."

Sif scooped the coil up and let it slide through her fingers. "It's beautiful," she admitted. "And it would be good to have some cushioning for my helm again, and to not..."

"People do talk, don't they?"

"As well you know," Sif said.

"Yes. That is, the dwarves didn't quite get the color right," he added, careless, "but it will grow as hair does, and you can wear your warrior's tail if you wish. Will you take it?"

"I will take it," Sif said. "...It won't all fall out in a fortnight, or turn my skin green, or strangle me in my sleep, will it?"

Loki's lips twitched. "It will not do anything that common hair does not do."

"Then I will take it," she said again. "How does it—"

"Here," said Loki, and went to stand behind her. It was simple enough, now, to draw out the salve he had used to render her hairless, although by the time he finished branding the bright end of each strand of hair against her head his shoulders were stiff, and Sif was tense with the effort of keeping still. The dark mass fell to the nape of her neck, although in the years to come she would wear it longer still, and never so short that it could not be braided away from her face; and when she looked up at him over her shoulder Loki was pleased to see that her brows had darkened to match.

"Is it finished?" she asked.

"All done," he promised. "You look much less like a boiled egg, although perhaps not quite so much less as we all would wish."

Sif hit him then, but not so hard as she once might have.

* * *

He fell, and as he fell he remembered what he would never have again. After this betrayal Sif would never hit him. Thor would not break the lock on his door and drag him to dinner; Frigga, oh his mother, would never bring him news of the worlds or correct his work, she would not smile and brush his hair from his face. There was no solace for Loki Laufeyson, no companionship, no honor. There was no Sif to hit him on the shoulder when he spoke too smartly, there was no Sif to read beside him, no more wandering through the woods and mountains, no more feasts in Asgard's great halls. Where Loki went there would be no sweet kisses and sharp rebukes, no dark laughing eyes, no slender hands calloused from years at the sword, and all this because Thor had cast him out of Asgard.

His heart turned bitter, and Loki thought of death, and how he might die, and how it would be better to die than be the desperate, hopeless creature he had become.

This was his state when he fell through the Aerie's gate.

On the other side of the gate, someone was waiting.

* * *

Loki's first act upon reaching majority was to move from the set of rooms he shared with his brother. Thor had been saddened (but not, it should be noted, _too_ saddened) when his brother announced the intention to move out, and after some thought Loki settled on the top two floors of a spindling tower somewhat removed from the main expanse of the palace. His tower was not so grand, perhaps, as Odin's mead-hall, but the top two floors were comfortable, and the view of the Sea of Space was beyond compare. Additionally there was a small training yard just beside the tower, and Loki thought this might be of use to him and to others who might wish to visit.

The lower floor he took as his bedchamber, and it was not so well furnished as most would expect, but he had a soft, wide bed, and a table at which to take his meals, and a fireplace to warm the room when the winter chill crept through Asgard, although Loki was more likely to have his windows flung open; he enjoyed the crisp snap of the air in winter. The top floor he took as a study and workroom. It was lined with shelves, which Loki soon filled with books and bottles and artifacts. He had worktables there, and a desk, and a cabinet for his writing and research. Beside the fireplace on the upper floor he put two armchairs, of the sort found in Asgard's library, and with a little effort he laid an intricate series of spells on the door, so that from the outside it always opened on Loki's study, but from the inside it might open on any number of places—his mother's receiving room, the library, Asgard's hall, Sif's stable-closet, even on his old quarters, which Thor had soon filled with trophies from across the realms.

And the years passed, and Thor grew in stature and in renown; his people called him 'Thunderer,' and it was said that someday he might be even greater a king than Odin—although this was never said in Odin's hearing—for Thor was strong and bold, but more open, more willing to listen, and he walked and supped and fought with the common folk as Odin did no longer. His people loved him, but they knew little of his brother.

Loki learned more every day, and every day discovered there was even less he knew. He read all the books in Asgard's library, though it took many years, and then he started from the beginning again; and he wrote his own books, which were never bound and would never sit in any library. There were few who would understand what Loki wrote, and fewer still he trusted with the knowledge, and soon enough even Frigga began to run short of things to teach him. By the time he was of age Loki could render himself invisible and teleport from one end of Asgard to the other; he could travel from Asgard to Midgard unassisted by Heimdall, hit a target a hundred yards away with a knife, freeze a man in his tracks or burn him living; he could recite the name and meaning of every one of Odin's runes; he could dance, comport himself in court, and speak some eight hundred languages, a number that grew with each season.

He could still, however, be surprised, and he was very surprised when he looked up from his work one day to discover a pair of liquid brown eyes staring back at him. The eyes blinked and shuttered, and then their owner yawned, a jaw-cracker that displayed her many teeth.

There was a puppy sitting on his desk.

"Hello," said Loki. The puppy yawned at him again, and then put her head down. She appeared to have every intention of going to sleep right there in the middle of his notes, so Loki picked her up and tucked her beneath one arm. His study door stood open to the stairway beyond; he closed it, touched a sigil carved into the back, and reopened it on the kennel. The kennelmaster was surprised that the pup had made it all the way up Loki's tower, but did not seem shocked that she had escaped. "That one's trouble," the master said. "Sort of a runt, but I didn't have the heart to drown her, and now she's always wandering off. I'll be damned if we'll ever make a hunter out of her. No discipline," he added, at Loki's raised brows.

"Quite," said Loki, and, after depositing the puppy in the master's arms, returned to his tower.

The next day the puppy returned, and the day after that, until Loki finally gave up on taking her back to the kennel and instead put a bowl of water and a bowl of shredded meat beneath his longest workbench, so that he wouldn't trip on her. "I suppose you've been weaned," he said to the animal. She wouldn't have to put up with his care for long, at any rate; Sif would be back from her hunting trip soon.

Indeed she was, and with a hart twice her size. She brought the antlers to show him, and after he'd expressed appropriate admiration for her prowess, she stripped off her sword and breastplate and dumped them in their customary resting place by the door. The problem came when she went to sit in her armchair and found it already occupied by the sighthound pup.

"What," said Sif, "is this?"

"Oh, that," said Loki. "That's yours. Many happy returns. I hope six-hundred and thirty is as good for you as six-hundred and twenty-nine."

Sif eyed the creature with an intensity that would make a more intelligent animal tuck his tail between his legs—if Loki had a tail, it would certainly be tucked—and then, as he had anticipated it would, a smile broke across her features.

"What's its name?" she asked.

"Her. And she hasn't one; that, Lady Sif, is entirely your decision."

"Gunda," Sif said at once.

"Splendid," said Loki. "She is after all a most warlike beast"—the puppy was gazing up at Sif as she chewed on her own tail—"and with such a name can do naught but strike the hearts of her enemies with fear."

"Asta, then," Sif said, "although I thought her name was mine to choose." She picked the puppy up nonetheless and held it before her; the pup wagged her tail and licked frantically at Sif's face, shedding fawny hairs into the air with every wriggle. "Yes, she looks like an Asta," said Sif.

Loki could not help himself, and he laughed aloud at the pair of them. They turned to look at him together, mistress and hound, at the same time, and with such identical expressions of scorn that he laughed all the harder.

"I am glad to amuse," Sif said, dryly, and took her seat. She had to work to contain the long puppy limbs that spilled from her lap, but when she had, and when Asta had burrowed her narrow head against Sif's side and gone to sleep, Loki poured her a cup of wine. He was still grinning with mirth.

Sif sipped once from her cup and then set it aside; her hands did not seem able to leave the dog's silky coat alone for long. "You are an ass," she said to him, "but I am still grateful. Thank you, Loki. You always give me such wonderful gifts."

"Yes, well," Loki said, "you deserve some compensation for enduring my presence." He turned away from her face and began to rearrange the glass flasks arranged on the south wall; they were out of order, lavender on the wrong shelf, aconite listing precariously close to the edge, bottled glory running low yet again...

When he glanced back at her, Sif was smiling. She seemed impossibly lovely, even with a leaf stuck in her hair and her boots dusty from travel; her limbs were long and corded, her movement graceful and easy, but it was the spirit that animated the flesh, the will that set her jaw and brightened her eyes, that seemed the loveliest of all.

"How was your trip?" Loki asked, to distract himself.

"Not too fraught with diplomatic difficulties," she said. "Hogun seemed glad to see his home again, although I think he was happier still to leave. Vanaheim fares better in his absence, he says."

"And how fares my brother's shoulder?"

"You know Thor, he wouldn't admit to the pain even if it did yet bother him. It seems to have healed well, although he is a little stiff when he swings his mallet."

"I urged him to _rest_," Loki grumbled, "but does he listen?"

Now it was Sif's turn to laugh. "You worry so," she said. "You are worse than Frigga! He's fine, Loki, although I'm surprised he hasn't come to visit yet."

"He'll be here soon enough. Too soon." Thor couldn't be counted on to leave Loki alone for long. "If fortune is kind to us, he'll decide to bathe and take a nap before he arrives to regale us with some new tale."

"Bathe, ha," Sif said. "He smells worse than his goats."

Loki crossed the room, plucked the leaf from her hair, and held it before her. "Yes, lady, I see you have much room to throw stones in this area."

"Are you saying I smell?" Sif said, and shoved him. As ever, she underestimated her own strength, and Loki was only just quick enough to return the leaf to her dark locks before he went tumbling into his own chair.

"If you smell," he said, "it could only be of the most fragrant—the most beautiful—the sweetest, comeliest things—flowers from my mother's gardens—"

"Liar. I know what your mother grows in her gardens."

"There are flowers there," Loki protested.

"But the flowers are not only flowers, are they?" she said. "At any measure, the hunt was good. Even Asgard's walls grow close after a long winter. This one was longer than the last, and the walls grew very close indeed." She looked down at her lap, and stroked the puppy; there was something amiss in her manner now, the good humor dried up with uncharacteristic quickness.

"What is it?" said Loki.

Sif kept her attention on the dog, but Loki knew enough of her to wait, and after a time his patience was rewarded when Sif said, "Odin's berserkers joined us. They feast in his hall tonight."

"Ah," said Loki.

They were a ferocious band, that was true, but it was not fear Sif felt. Although she had never admitted as much, Loki suspected there was nothing she desired more than to be one of their number, to wear her wolf-pelt and swear her sword to the defense of the Realm Eternal. She had the skill, and she had the blood-rage—Loki had only seen it descend on her once, when a pair of assassins had stolen into Asgard and Volstagg's children had been caught in the crossfire, but it was a vision that he would never forget, no matter how long he grew in the tooth—but the berserkers did not take kindly to the suggestion that a woman might fight in their midst.

"You know," he said, and picked up her discarded cup of wine, "I heard a new story while you were gone."

"Loki—"

"You'll like this one," he said. "I was attempting to return your damnable dog there to the kennel when I overheard three youths talking. Arguing, rather—it seemed there was a disagreement about which of Asgard's hunters was the fiercest. The first lad thought the honor belonged to Tyr, because, he said, Tyr was strong enough to bring down any beast. The second lad disagreed; he said that the greatest huntsman was surely the Lord Thor, who was as swift as the lightning he commanded, and who after all had defeated Hercules and stolen the glory of his prey, which is why the Nemean Lion's pelt hangs in Asgard. They were both wrong, however."

"Oh?" said Sif.

"Oh yes," Loki said. "In fact, the third youth was a young lady—in fact, if I recall correctly she was one of Volstagg's get, the girl named Hilde—quick to point out that neither Tyr nor Thor could track a creature half so well as Sif, nor did they try for the challenging prey Sif preferred. The girl added, and rightly so, that Sif could bring down a falcon in full flight, that she could stalk a rabbit with such skill that the rabbit would see not even her shadow, that she was light-footed enough to run down a white hart and brave enough to face a pair of chimera in their own nest."

Loki paused to consider his wine, and then took a sip of it and savored the mouthful.

"The first youth jeered at this idea and said that Sif was only a woman, and one they called the Lady of the Harvest besides. Young Hilde would not stand for this offense, and declared that what Sif harvested was not grain.

"'Then what does she reap?' asked the second youth.

"Here is where I would say young Hilde won her argument, because she answered him, '_Lives_. And that is why they call her the Lady of the Harvest _and_ the Hunt. If you don't believe me, let's see who brings home the biggest hart from Vanaheim.' And here you are, and did you not take the grandest trophy of any?"

"So I did," said Sif, satisfied. "Think what I will do when this little one is grown, too; Asgard's enemies will quake with fear, when they hear the howls of Asta and know that Sif dogs their heels!"

"Dogs indeed," Loki said. Sometimes he wondered at his own sanity, that this was the woman he found so enchanting. "Soon, I fear, you will have a whole fleet of them, until you are borne into battle on the backs of yapping puppies, and my study will forever be covered in dog hair."

"Oh, shut up," Sif said, but not without affection—or so Loki fancied.

Eventually she reclaimed her cup, and more wine to go with it, and when the fire had burned low in the grate Sif collected her antlers and her still-slumbering puppy and retired to her own quarters. Loki let her out through his ensorcelled door, opening it in the middle of a wall in Frigga's garden; the night-blooms were in full flower, and marsh-lights danced above them as they had once danced in the clearing of a certain spider. Sif sighed at him, and rolled her eyes, but still she stopped in the garden and bent to inhale the gentle sweet scent. Loki watched her, and for once made no secret of watching.

They were young to marry, and even so Loki doubted she would ever accept his suit. She was, if still something of an oddity—this woman who went to war but had not sworn the oaths of the Valkyrie—certainly a rising star. She had the favor of Thor and of the queen; she comported herself on the battlefield and in private with valor; and she had, against all, grown to be astonishingly comely. Loki flattered himself into thinking that the black hair suited her better than the golden ever had, this warrior who was becoming a dark goddess of war.

He was still thinking of her when he shut the door and went idly to his workbench, where he began sifting through the clutter simply to give himself something else to think over. It didn't work, of course, because under a sheaf of papers and some leaves from Idunn's apple tree he found the thick coil of hair he'd cut from Sif so very long ago. He untangled it and combed it through, and then he started plaiting it, weaving spells into the braid as he went. Hair was useful stuff, if not half so magically practical as teeth.

* * *

They caught him with gentle hands, but those hands had the wrong number of fingers, Loki thought—or did they? It was hard to tell; he wanted for water and rest, was nearing the end of his reserves, and some far-off thing had flash-blinded him on his fall.

They caught him with gentle hands, and then they cleaned his face and gave him just enough water to moisten his throat, and then they brought him to Thanos.

"I have been waiting for you a long time," Thanos said.

"I am," replied Loki, "so very sorry to be late."

* * *

And one day she came to him still bloodied from the field; her sword was bare, and she held it as an extension of her arm. Loki, who had himself made one of his rare open appearances in the melee at his brother's request, had opened the earth beneath the fire demons of Muspelheim; a good number of them had been swallowed whole, buried alive, their flames extinguished beneath the weight of the ground above, but Loki had taken no chance against the forces of Surtur, and had only just finished laying a sealing on the field when Sif strode through the smoke and fire with her naked blade.

Loki had also slain a number of the fire demons personally, intimately, and he bore the marks of it in his scorched throat and soot-streaked armor, but he had not slain so many as Sif, who had descended with her raiders like fury herself given the form of a maiden, and if before there had been those who still spoke snidely of Sif's prowess—well, Loki doubted they would slander her further. Her face and armor were soaked through with blood, and her cloak, too, had darkened from wine-red to the color of earth stained with blood. She had lost her buckler in the sortee, but the rush still sang through her; when he saw her Loki slowed his movement and stowed the knife he held, in case she was still so blinded in her battle madness that she mistook him for a threat. Asta trotted behind her mistress, her muzzle wet with red.

"My lady," Loki called, but she did not answer him, merely kept to her long strides until she reached him; and then she fisted one hand in his gold ornamental gorget, yanked him down to her level, and kissed him. It was more a clashing of teeth than a tender gesture, but Loki recovered quickly and thereafter acquitted himself well, so that when she drew away she was breathing harder still.

"Taking another trophy?" Loki quipped.

Her eyes widened, and her jaw went slack with shock, and she whirled away and left even more rapidly than she had had arrived. Asta whined and pushed at Loki's hand to be petted; he stroked her head once before she bolted after her mistress.

"Well," said Loki; and he touched his lips, and he smiled.

After the battle, when the prisoners had been taken to their cells, when the dead had been buried, when Loki had briefed his father and himself been briefed by the Master of Whispers, he was free to retire to his tower, and once the door had been shut and locked behind him, he laughed for the sheer pleasure of laughing.

She might mean to hide forever; she might refuse to ever see him again, or claim that she had made an error, or that her heat was up from the fight—but when her head _was_ up from battle, what Sif wanted was Loki, and so she had sought him out and laid that kiss on him like a brand. She could deny much, but she could never take that satisfaction from him.

Sif did hide, and for a long time. When she saw Loki she made her excuses—and they were never subtle, because although Sif understood the value of subtlety in campaign she had never mastered it in conversation—but more conspicuous was that she never sought him out; they were cordial enough before other people, but their friendship was a private thing, and Loki was only beginning to fully understand why.

He finally grew tired of their days of careful dance and went looking for her. She was not in the room she kept in the huntsmen's wing of the palace—for however little she needed the title, however nobled her lineage, however often she rode out at the prince's own side, it was as a huntswoman that she earned her bread and butter—nor in the stables; she was not in Volstagg's home, where she sometimes took refuge with his wife, Hildegund; she was not even with Thor, who was unconcerned with her absence but was persistent in asking Loki to accompany him to Midgard to view some new invention called a locomotive. Loki privately thought of his brother as something of a very experienced, very sturdy tourist.

"No thank you, brother—perhaps some other time," he said, and then as a last resort Loki went looking for his mother. She was in her garden, picking herbs for medicinal salves; Asgard had not faced the might of Surtur without losses.

"Hello, my son," she said. "Have you come to help your poor old mother gather plants?"

"My poor old mother turned back a contingent of fire demons on the steps of the palace itself," Loki said, but he ran his hands over his hair, sighed, and knelt to help her anyway. They worked in silence; a pair of jackdaws croaked in flirtation, the summer sun shone hot above them, and Loki's high collar felt uncomfortable tight at his throat. He resettled the gold gorget that sat below his neck twice before his mother's basket was full.

"Now then," she said. "I suppose you're here to complain about your father's feast. If you make an appearance, I don't think he will mind so very much if you leave before the dancing begins, although it would do your poor old mother's heart much good to see you meet and marry some clever woman who will give you fat, clever children."

"A feast?" Loki said. This had escaped his notice. Feasts were not rare in Asgard, for the Aesir were fond of a good party, and the parties they threw were good beyond compare, but there were few celebrations like the ones given after a victory in battle.

"Tomorrow night," Frigga said. "Is there something else on your mind, my love?"

"Always." He touched his fingers to his chin and then smiled at her, quicksilver sure.

"But nothing you will speak of, I see," she said. "Very well, then. Will you help me in the infirmary? They've depleted their stock, and as you well know, a queen has little better use than slaving over a hot fire."

"I am eternally grateful that we had someone else to cook for us as children; otherwise we would still be stricken with guilt at your many pains," Loki said. He offered her his arm, and as he'd hoped she would, Frigga laughed.

She took his arm, too, and, ever his teacher, said, "Well then, my clever son, perhaps you can help me. I would like a potion to lower fever and rehydrate the patient both, but all of my own efforts have turned out rather more poisonous than I intended..."

Loki planned his strategy that evening. He didn't think anyone had seen Sif approach him on the battlefield—and if they had, what then? He thought nothing of it himself; those of Odin's court took lovers as they would, and discarded them just as easily. Sif, though—she would not be won easily, if she was willing to be won. There was a thrill, too, in the idea that she might be stalking him, or might be convinced to stalk him, even as Loki was ensnaring her. Whichever way the battle went, he meant to have her, provided that she wanted to be had.

Now that he knew to look for it, he saw that the Shining City was abustle with preparations; Asgard had quit the field of battle only a handful of days ago, and in addition to shoring up her supply lines and questioning her new prisoners and patching up those of her warriors who required it, there were now invitations to be sent, game to be caught and cooked, tables to be set—and decorations, and dress, and entertainment, of which to think. Loki spent the better part of that day trying on different faces; he was first blond and burly, and then blond and svelte, and then stocky and red-haired, and none suited him half so well as dark and tall and biting.

When the appointed hour arrived he dressed carefully in the armor that he wore only on rare occasions, and he put his horned gold helm on his head. There was a procession lining up outside of the great hall, and an empty spot at the rear beside Thor. When he stepped into place, his brother elbowed him companionably in the side and said, "Loki, look!"

Loki was unsure if Thor was pointing at the roasted boar floating past or the handsome serving-man who carried it, and said as much. After a brief scuffle Thor declared that he'd been pointing at neither, and made Loki edge out of the line until he could see the enormous picture-frame carried by two of the Vanir. The painting within was of a dark-haired woman gazing at a starry sky; the constellations were not of Asgard.

"Is there nothing you dislike?" Loki said. "I cannot say you have bad taste, brother, because I'm not sure you can even be said to have taste at all."

"I wouldn't like it if the Jotun had painted it," Thor grumbled. Loki gave him a look of transparent doubt, and he amended his statement to, "Look at the starlight on her face!"

"Are you a poet now?"

"I'll show you poet," Thor said, and then he put Loki in a headlock. Loki's helmet fell off and clattered noisily to the ground, but Thor did not relent, and when Frigga found them Loki was in the process of pulling his brother's trousers around his knees. Their mother said nothing, only sighed and clasped her hands before her and adopted such a woeful expression that they straightened immediately.

"Sorry, Mother," Thor said.

"No, no," she said. "I am sad to see my grown sons squabbling like children, of course, but it is not their fault that their mother did not teach them discipline. Poor parenting will be our downfall, and someday the bards will say that Frigga led Asgard to doom, but please. Don't stop on my account."

"Oh for—it isn't your fault, Mother," said Loki, and replaced his helm. Thor glared at him, and Loki glared back, and then all of the sudden they were grinning at each other, as much co-conspirators as they'd been since birth. It was impossible to stay mad at Thor.

They made their entrance, and Loki stood for an appropriate amount of time at the head of the hall while the masses cheered for his brother, and then he greeted an appropriate number of dignitaries with an appropriate degree of charm, and then he sat beside his mother and ate of all the appropriate dishes. He raised his glass, too, and made an appropriate toast to his father, and to Thor, and to the valiant warriors who had won the field, and after that nobody minded when he bowed out of the rest of the evening. Loki couldn't quite remember if he was currently cultivating a delicate constitution or a fear of crowds or a pressing need to lock himself away with his books—that one was true, or true enough, that he used it often—but some previous claim served him well, and Odin waved him away without looking at him.

When he returned he was wearing the guise of a man of middling height, with blandly inoffensive features and brown hair that fell almost to his shoulders; he had dressed himself in a hunter's leathers, that he might not rouse suspicion for monopolizing the time of a particular huntress. The huntress he had in mind was sitting moodily in a high-backed chair, no doubt intimidating all the suitors who wished to dance with her. Someone had coaxed her out of her armor and into a rouge-color dress and gold bracelets. With her hair pulled back and powder on her cheeks, she should have looked most unlike Sif, but Sif was incapable of looking anything other than exactly who she was.

"Lady Sif," Loki said, and made an elegant leg—perhaps too elegant for his assumed station, but he needed to both catch her attention and hold it. "May I have the honor...?"

She looked over his shoulder, perhaps at her father, who was one of the few who could make her look so openly mulish, and said, "Of course." She was distracted as she stood up and took his hand, but she didn't fight him too much for the lead as they took their place amongst the dancers. Loki led her through her paces. She danced prettily, and did not look him in the eyes once. When the music drew to a close he said, "Again? It would seem to suit my lady's purposes."

"Yes," she said, and, "Thank you, my lord." There was a gash over her nose; had she been to see him, he could have it healed in moments.

"And where is your companion?" Loki murmured.

"Locked in my room," she answered automatically, and then jerked back. She covered it well, but he'd wanted her attention, and now he had it. "How do you...?"

"Even in the farthest-flung corners of Asgard, the people know that where Sif goes, so go her hounds." Loki took her through a quarter-turn; they separated briefly, traded partners, and then were swept back together.

"Just the one," she said, "although I had some thought of breeding her; I have never met a dog so faithful."

"Does she follow you to war, and bear witness to your triumphs?" Loki asked. He was playing now, seeing how long it would take her to catch a glimpse of what lay beneath his guise. He did not, as a rule, wager; but if he did, he would not wager against her.

"Yes, she does," said Sif. Her jaw set, and she added, "Forgive me," before whirling away from him out of turn. Loki kept faith, and after a few more steps she returned to his arms. "My father," she explained. "He's here tonight. I don't see him often, but he's becoming unrelenting in his insistence that I marry—"

Loki flinched.

It was this and not any other tell that gave him away. Her head snapped up and then her gaze travelled, slowly, from their joined hands, and how lightly he clasped her, up his arm and his shoulder; she lingered at his throat, and then her eyes met his. As long as she would look at him like that, with such unfathomable sternness, he thought he would need neither bread nor wine but only her to satisfy him.

"_Loki,_" she said.

"Hello," said Loki.

"What are—how did you—?" She touched his cheek, and then his chest; when he glanced at the dancers still whirring around them, she snatched her hand away and resumed her steps. "How have you—?"

"A trick of the light," he said, grinning, "one I learned in books I am probably not meant to have. You've been hiding from me, Sif."

"My father will—"

"If he wants to marry you off that badly, then he cannot object to seeing you dance with a suitor. _Is_ he so desperate to give you away?"

"Yes," she said, "but I can put him off. Loki..."

"Yes, lady?"

She pursed her lips at him in ire, and Loki, who was still grinning rather—rather _madly_—felt such delight that he spun her out and back in with a flourish.

"You're doing the steps wrong!" she hissed.

"As if you care so very much about the proper _steps_," said Loki. "Now, what was it we were discussing? Oh yes—why you were avoiding me."

"I wasn't—" The vehemence of their conversation was beginning to attract stares, although the music was unceasing and raucous; Sif lowered her voice. "I wasn't _avoiding_ you," she said.

"Oh? I suppose it's a coincidence that we haven't seen each other in four days, and here I thought you enjoyed my company."

"Tolerate," she said. "I tolerate your company. Let's talk about something else."

"Why is your father so suddenly interested in your unmarried state?"

"Not that!" she said.

Loki swept her to the edge of the floor, where the shadows themselves danced between the tall columns in the light of ten thousand floating candelabras. She would not speak, but she followed him, matched his steps and met his hands when they reached for her. When they were less the center of the revelry, she said, "It is possible my father learned that I am not _only_ a huntswoman. Tales finally reached his ears of the berserker woman who fights at the Thunderer's side. He was...less than pleased."

"He can't force you into a union," Loki said.

"No," she said, "but there is still a childish part of me that does not wish to displease my father, however long ago our paths parted." She snorted. "Don't think that I will yield to him; if I marry, it will be when and to whom I please."

"Just so," Loki said. "And if you still don't wish to discuss why you've been avoiding me, I will pose another question: Why has Sif not used these tales of her prowess to win admittance to the company of the berserkers?"

Her eyes flashed at him, and now she was the one who propelled him through the next series of passes. "Do you think me a coward? Is that what you're implying?"

"A coward? Not in this matter"—and then he laid his bait—"but I think it would do you well to be reminded that what we of Asgard call bloodlust is neither a blindness nor a curse. The berserkergang is not a haze that steals your reason nor a demon that whets your appetite for destruction, my lady."

Carefully, now; even a bold wolf would flee if it smelled the snare…

"What, then, is it?" she asked.

"Permission," said Loki. "It is permission to be _exactly who you are_." And she was Sif, who was wild, and who was strong; who hunted best on moonless nights, who was first to war and lingered last on the field; who was all of these things, but who was compassionate, and gallant, and wicked besides. Loki wanted her: whole and entire.

She turned her face away from him, but there was a sharpness playing at her lips. "Heimdall was right. I was cowardly to run from you."

"The token you bestowed on me," Loki said. "Will you call it a mistake, and take it back?"

"The kiss, you mean." They were turned ever more slowly, form and tempo long forgotten as they drew ever deeper into the shadows. Sif sighed. "Talking to you makes me want to drink. Will you look at me?"

Not grasping her meaning, he said, "I am looking at you."

"No," she said, "not like this, not with a stolen face. Show me Loki."

He was unsettled, but he let the glamour shimmer into nothingness, until he faced her in the black and green that was suitable for a sorcerer but far too plain for a feast in Odin's hall. Sif examined him for what seemed an endless time, and finally she smiled.

"You want me," she said.

"Yes," said Loki, who was still unsettled.

"I never thought either of us would admit it."

"I am admitting it now," he said.

There was darkness and brilliance in her gaze. "If we're going to ravish each other, I can think of better places to do it than here."

"I—oh." Loki felt his brows raise almost to his hairline. "Is there going to be ravishing?" It was possible that his plan had been lacking in details, or at least an executable timeline.

"There is," said Sif, "provided you have no objections."

"I can think of none," he said, and then he bowed elegantly. Sif took him by the hand and led him to his chambers; there were none in the palace who were not at the feast, and so nobody noticed when the darker passages of the palace developed a tendency to whisper and laugh to themselves.

And then they reached his tower, and his bedroom directly thereafter, and Loki was pleased that he had not had to lie to her once, and that she had caught him as readily as he had caught her; and she took off her bangles, and she unclasped his ornamental collar with her own two hands. Was that not best? He had fashioned the gorget, after all, from her shorn hair—golden, enchanted, and glittering.

* * *

Thanos had his feet bound with iron chains, and Loki, who retained enough awareness to know that if he did not escape now he would not escape at all, struggled against them; and when his strength could not break the chains, he poured his power into them. He froze them, and they burned hot enough to sear his feet; he crushed them, but they did not shatter. When all else failed he changed his form, to Jotun, to bear, to spider, to wolf, to serpent, to flea, to dragon, to hare back to serpent before he flicked to magpie and fox and lion and he twisted and he fought and he shifted too fast to follow, until the hands that grasped him could no longer find purchase, but the chains held. He became a falcon and beat his wings furiously against the bottomless sky, and then crocodile with jaws as strong as any hunter's trap, and then giant, and dwarf, and human, demon and mouse and butterfly; and still the chains held.

When he had exhausted the last of the strength, they flayed him open, that they might demonstrate to Thanos how he worked, and they tasted his heart, that they might know him themselves, and then they dragged him to the foot of an immense tree. The chains were tight around his legs, had bitten so deeply into his ankles he was sure that link rubbed against bone. Last of all they tossed the chain over one of the tree's titanic branches, and they hoisted him high. The pain of it ate him alive.

Thanos left him there, hanging inverted from the tree, until Loki was sure he was still falling, and longer still, until the silence echoed in the vasty chambers of his skull, and longer still, until Loki cried out for those he had loved, and longer still, until even those names had lost all meaning. Only then did Thanos come to him.

Loki drew in a breath through his cracked lips, and he forced his lungs to draw air, and with great effort he forced words from his throat. "Give me my freedom," he said.

"Freedom?" said Thanos. "Freedom is an illusion. They tell me you're something of an expert at illusions. I will break you of that arrogance."

"How will you manage that?" croaked Loki.

"You'll do it yourself," said Thanos, and then he went away again, and left Loki alone.

No matter. Loki had always been alone. There was, in the past, an inkling of a memory, but it was not of love, because Loki had always been alone.

And he hung on the tree, and he waited; and after an eon, the memory came in full.

* * *

There had been a time when Loki thought himself happy.

Asgard's long war against Surtur had seemed endless, and neither Loki nor Sif had minded; the war was but a distraction, a game, a chance to win glory and sharpen skill. They were busy and tired and satisfied, and in the evenings, rather than sleep, they found their stolen moments where they could. One or both of them might be called away at a moment's notice, to aid Thor or Odin on some lightning campaign; Sif led her huntsmen in battle or fought with Thor and the Warriors Three, and more than once had offered counsel to the prince, and Loki—well, what of Loki?

He went as he would, and although the invitation had not been offered, he found himself caught ever tighter by the web of Odin's spies. Intelligence became his air, rumors the ground beneath his feet, long lists of supplies and troop movements and maps that, when unfurled, were longer still—these became his craft, his trade, and his passion. Thor found uses for him, too, more often than not in casting some spell to confuse or blind or, yes, even dampen the enemy, but it was with the whisperers that Loki found a home for his guile. Few knew of his involvement on the front lines, and fewer still of his link to Asgard's spies, and he liked it best that way; he was, after all, still inclined to the privacy of his tower.

And the seasons turned, winter to spring to summer to fall, and with long effort the tide shifted in Asgard's favor; the soldiers marched to war, but at home the people worked the land and had children and got married and buried their dead. The grains grew and were harvested, and some was stored away in preparation for the winter snows, and on the day after frost first touched the Shining City, Odin won his victory. Surtur broke under Gungnir's might, and his horde was cast back to its dark pit, and like a receding wave, the Aesir came home.

That Yule, there was such revelment as there had not been in centuries. For week upon week, visitors paid upon Asgard treasures, works of art and gifts beyond compare, and the visitors could not bring themselves to leave; and bards and poets and even ham-tongued soldiers sang songs and told tales of Asgard's warriors, and more than one of these spoke to the beauty of the Lady Sif, and the swiftness with which her battle madness descended.

And as Asgard reveled, the skies broke open, and the snows fell, and although most took this as a sign to dig into their halls and warm homes, Loki took it as leave to steal Sif away.

They left at sunset. Sif was followed by her dog, of course, and a few of Loki's magpies fluttered persistently round his head until he drove them back to their roosts. He didn't tell Sif their goal; the curiosity was about to drive her mad, he could tell, but she bit her lip stubbornly and didn't ask questions as they shouldered their bags and started out.

When they were deep in the woods, Asgard at their backs, he finally said, "Ask."

"Why can't you _fly_ us there?" she burst out. There was a guide-light floating ahead of them, but the snows were deep enough that Asta at times sunk to her chest, although she always plunged faithfully into the next drift. The snowfall was light for the time being, and the winds calm; nonetheless, the chill was cutting. "Why did I have to pack so much? Why couldn't we ride? Where _are_ we going?"

"Haven't you heard?" he said. "It's the journey that matters, not the destination."

"Your mysterious journey can fuck itself," she said, but without any venom. "Where are my answers?"

"I said you might ask. I made no promise to reply to your questions."

Sif, displaying her magnificent flexibility, bent at the waist, scooped up a handful of snow, and flung it at Loki's face. He turned it into a cloud of firemoths, each one translucent and crystalline, that fluttered back to Sif and landed in her hair before they melted all at once.

What she threw next was not snow but a brick of ice.

"Maybe," he said, after he'd changed the ice into a daisy-chain, "I'll just leave you here. In the forest. All alone. _To die_."

"Please. You couldn't lose me in the woods if your life depended on it," said Sif.

"You know, my mother flatters my father. She doesn't throw things at him."

"Now I know you're lying," she said, with such a fierce smile that he could do nothing but grin back, helpless.

They were still smiling stupidly at each other when they reached the grove of trees that would take them to their retreat. The gateway was between two trees that stood some four feet apart at the base but had, due to the curious slant of their trunks, grown together at the height of a man's head.

"Oh, this is one of your portals," said Sif. "Is something wrong with my brother's bridge?"

"The only problem is your brother, and how violently he dislikes me. The lady first?" Loki offered her his hand.

She rolled her eyes at him but slid her fingers into his, and when he handed her through there was a shimmer and then Sif was no more. Asta whined in alarm.

"She's on the other side," Loki said, and sighed. "Go on, then." The animal crept forward, casting him more than one look of bone-deep betrayal before she finally crawled between the trunks and vanished herself. Loki stepped through directly after. One foot rested on a bed of snow; the other landed on a thick rug laid over stone; and then he was in Everwinter.

The manor—it was not quite a castle, although it was a little grander than most hunting-lodges—was an old holding of his mother's, one that few now ever visited. Loki had been here the day before to lay fires in the grates and shake out the bedding. He had brought comforts, too: morsels for Sif's hound, mead and other wines, soft clothing that wouldn't turn away arrow or spear but that did feel delicious against the skin, and books in plenty, both the adventures and poetry Sif preferred and his own more arcane texts.

He would truthfully be surprised if they made much use of the last, but he'd intended this trip as respite, too. Sif had been long afield, leading her raiders, and when Loki wasn't consulting with his spies, he was interpreting portents and reading the stars, or spreading propaganda, or travelling among the common folk and beasts of other worlds to hear their intelligence, or enchanting weapons, or—

If he had any sense, he'd feel tired, but even in the midst of prolonged campaign his head was all full of Sif.

His lady herself was still beside him; only a little moonlight crept in through the windows, so Loki lit the candles with a gesture. From Sif's lips fell a gasp, and she strode to the window. Through the window they could see only snow, and mountains, and more snow. Even the twinkling stars above were lost in the grey of the blizzard.

"Where are we?" she asked.

"Far north of the seat of Hlidskjalf," said Loki. "Everwinter, they call it, because as long as my father has lived, and indeed his father Bor before him, and Bor's father Buri before Bor, the summer has not touched this land. Few venture here now. I have heard that if you ride too far north, you'll fall right off the edge into Niflheim."

"Now there's an adventure," Sif murmured, and leaned closer to the glass set in the window. Loki came up behind her, and when she did not shift or protest, he came closer still, sliding an arm around her waist and tucking his chin over her shoulder. She was a tall woman, only a hand or just over it below his own height.

"I regret if I've given you any ideas," he murmured back, and was rewarded when her reflection smiled.

"For the time being, I am tired of adventures. We could stay here forever, you know."

"You would be missed eventually," Loki said idly, more interested in loosening her hair; she was wearing it drawn into a tail at her crown—practical for a warrior—but unbound it fell nearly to the small of her back. He combed through it and then swept it over her shoulder to bare the nape of her neck, and here he pressed his lips until she shuddered. Her head turned, angling her chin over her shoulder to look back at him, and he stole the opportunity to further his advance by laying a line of kisses up her throat, and then across her jaw, and finally to the corner of her mouth.

When he advanced no further, Sif scolded him: "Don't tease me, Odinson."

"Teasing?" he said. "Would I tease you?"

"You do nothing but," she said, and turned fully in his arms. When she kissed him, she tasted of copper.

After some time he managed to coax her away from the cold window, although they made it only so far as the bed before they were distracted again. The blizzard had calmed, Bil had set, and Hjuki was low on the horizon when Sif, attired only in a sheet, rose long enough to feed Asta and let her into the courtyard to void her bladder.

"The larder is stocked full enough to feed an army," she said upon re-entering the bedchamber. "If not for the boredom of inaction, I really would stay here forever." Beyond the foot of the bed, the fire flickered low; she stooped to throw another log on the grate, careful to keep her sheet from the embers.

Loki stretched all the way to his toes and then held up the blankets for her. "I prefer to think I have other ways to keep you entertained, but a Sif without battle is a sad Sif indeed. Shall I summon you a creature, so you might court me with brave deeds?"

She snorted as she curled up against him and buried her cold face against his neck. "We aren't the usual, are we," she said.

"No," he said, "but I would rather have your good counsel than a sweet and false meekness. Provided, that is, that you don't mind a dusty scholar in your bed."

Sif bit him. He tugged at her hair in retaliation.

"If you're only a dusty scholar, then I really am meek," she said. "But the truth is that I mind not in the least. Hah, you're still the most interesting person I've ever met."

"Well now, brave heart, it seems you mean to flatter me after all," said Loki, and then he rolled her over and offered his own sort of flattery.

They lingered in Everwinter for nine days and nine nights, sleeping when they were tired, eating when they hungered, having each other until Loki knew Sif's body as well as he knew his own, and all the times in between they filled with conversation. Sif was herself no poet, but her mind was quick and her opinions both well-argued and all the better for their originality. He could talk to her for a hundred lifetimes and never tire of her.

They even talked, in vaguest terms, of the future. Although Odin had not yet named his successor, it was clear he favored Thor, and while Loki felt a helpless disappointment at this most obvious of choices, he couldn't begrudge his brother the throne.

"Do you really want it?" Sif asked, curious.

"Sorry?" he said. Her arm was thrown over his ear, which made it difficult to hear her.

She moved the offending limb and said again, "Do you really want it? To rule, I mean."

Loki thought about this while he traced patterns over her bare back, and after a time said, "Perhaps not. I am better suited to work from behind the throne than atop it, at any rate, and once Thor has had some more seasoning he'll make a capable king. Though thank the stars that day has not yet come," he added.

"Someday I'll be a warrior," she said. "That is, a true warrior, who has taken oaths, and not a hunstwoman who follows the prince from battle to battle like a lackey."

"And after you've won your wolf pelt?"

"Children," she said. "No more than two. And when they are grown I intend to be as fat as Volstagg, and in my old age I will raise dogs, I think. You?"

Loki cleared his throat. "Two sounds nice," he managed, and he felt Sif smile against him.

What few times they grew restless were spent meandering through the manor or its courtyard. The snow was piled hip-deep despite the blowing winds and slanting shelter of the lodge itself, except, of course, where Asta had plowed through it. Sif had drawn her borrowed fur tighter around her neck and made to retreat, but Loki caught her by the elbow and bowed. In bowing, he caught up a fistful of the snow; he brought his fist to his mouth, uncurled his fingers, and breathed out the heat of his belly.

The melt was slow at first, but soon little rivulets cut through the courtyard's drifts, and then in in a great rush the water began to run off the little hillock in the northwestern corner. Loki drew the water into the earth, deep and deeper, and on a whim—and with a slanting glance at Sif—he put the water to use, and let it pour a dream of spring into what slumbered beneath the snow.

Before their eyes, the courtyard transformed into a thick carpet of green shoots, and the shoots became stalks, and grew leaves and then furled buds, and the buds opened into flowers of a far purer white than mere snow.

Loki knew that there were few to whom Sif would reveal any appreciation for what was tender and beautiful and fleeting; he took it as a compliment that she dropped to her knees to cup a snowdrop in her hands.

He knelt beside her and reached out to pluck a blossom to tuck into her hair, but quick as a cat she caught his hand. "Don't," she said. "Please. They're fine as they are. No—'fine' isn't the right word, but I would have to borrow your tongue to say what I mean. Thank you."

His fabled tongue failed him in the face of this quieter pleasure, and finally he managed, "...It's nothing."

The snowdrops, meant to be a momentary trick, bloomed as long as they were there, and even Loki couldn't say what sustained them; although he could make a reasonable guess, what lay at the heart of their nourishment eluded him.

On the ninth night Sif laid a fire in the solar, and Loki poured them both cups of mead, that they might make the traditional toasts. Asta curled up on the hearth, her nose tucked neatly under one forelimb; Sif scratched the creature behind her ear, and Asta's tail thumped thrice before she sighed and settled into sleep.

"Well?" said Sif. Loki rolled his eyes and made a show of inconvenience, and then he lit the fire without match or tender. Sif smirked at him when he passed her a cup.

Loki stretched his legs toward the fire and crossed them at the ankles. "Have I amused you?"

"Not intentionally," she retorted, but she sat beside him all the same, tugging one of the furs over her lap. "To what do we drink?"

"To our kin who have departed the world?"

"To the All-Father?"

"Oh, surely not," Loki said, frowning.

"Will you ever make peace with him?" she said, and then answered her own query. "No, of course you won't. You're too much alike."

Loki snorted into his cup. "I am nothing like my father."

"Aren't you? I would think you'd like being compared to him. He's a good ruler."

"No arguments there," said Loki. "But I would rather be like myself. Do you know why he favors the Norsemen, my father? Why he takes their heroes to his halls and woos them like a suitor woos a lover?"

"Their valor," Sif said. There was a drop of mead beaded on her upper lip; her tongue darted out and licked it away.

"No. It's because we've interbred with them, and Odin would never let a line descended of the Aesir to fade into obscurity. He is a good ruler, that much is true, and a good ruler is practical; but as I grow older I find his brand of practicality chills my blood." For all that Loki desired Odin's approval—and he was honest enough to admit to himself that he did so desire—he intended to be a very different kind of leader. Odin waged war relentlessly, as did Thor, who modelled himself on the All-Father, but in their warmongering they destroyed much. Whether he took the throne himself or merely whispered into Thor's ear, Asgard's absolute rule would become less a threat than a shelter.

"That can't be—"

"You know we have. And why shouldn't we? They're compatible with our physiology, if contemptibly stupid, and even an immortal race needs to refresh its bloodlines or risk disease."

She set down her cup. "Sometimes I think I wandered blind in the dark before I met you," she said. "Not to Odin, then."

"To a good harvest," Loki proposed.

"And good hunting," Sif said, and they drank.

Loki topped off their cups and stole a kiss from Sif for his payment. When he drew away, he said, "And now?"

"To duty," said Sif.

"To luck," said Loki. They drank. Outside, the wind beat against the stone walls, and the snows blew white like frost demons howling for prey, but inside the lodge was warm, and dark, and quiet, with no light but the light from the fire, and no danger but the danger limning Sif's eyes. She touched his face, traced his throat and open collar, and stole her kiss back.

"And third?" said Loki, voice no more than a whisper.

Sif caught her lip between her teeth as she thought, and then she said, "To Asgard."

"To home," he corrected, and together they drank for the last time.

* * *

When even the taste of long-ago happiness had fled from him, Thanos returned.

Loki didn't look at him, not at first; instead he stared up, past his feet, past the tree. He could see the stars through the branches, and if he looked hard enough, just there, he could see his father, looking down at him from the sundered precipice of the Bifrost. He wondered if that was how Odin had looked, if he'd carried that same expectant distance in his face, when he killed Laufey and stole Laufey's son from his arms—

No. No, that wasn't right, was it? Laufey had cast his son out to die long before Odin interfered—

"How goes your lesson, god-child?" Thanos's voice was inexorability itself. Here was a being to reckon with giants and gods alike. Something deep in Loki shuddered, to hear that voice roll over him.

It took a long time, a very long time, to tear his eyes away from the starry sky above his feet, and longer still to force his eyes to focus.

"Why—" he started, and then had to stop to heave. "Why haven't you killed me?"

"Is that what you want?" Thanos said.

Loki shut his eyes again. "Yes."

"I understand your longing," the beast said, and there was such resonant sympathy in his voice that any sane man would be moved to echo his yearning. "I seek the hand of that fair lady myself. I wonder, child, if you have ever been in love, and if you have, what line you wouldn't cross in the name of that dark instinct."

Words, words, always words. Loki no longer cared to puzzle out their meaning. Rather, he said, "Kill me. Do it." Dully: "Have my head." And then he pleaded: "If you mean to have me dead, then why draw out this farce? Let it be done. —_Please_."

Thanos reached up, cupped Loki's head, ran thick fingers through his hair. "Death?" he said. "Oh, child, you think that Death would want you? I will tell you now: There is no relief for you. There is no sweet respite; there is no ending. There is only you, hanging here, forever."

Thanos stood, and watched, until Loki understood that there would be no rescue, that he was alone, and that his aloneness was absolute; and then, satisfied, Thanos watched as Loki realized he hung in a prison of his own making.

If Loki could summon feeling, he would drown in despair; but that dullness blunted all, and what the dullness did not consume, the pain swallowed whole. His bones felt like hot irons shoved beneath skin and muscle, and the joints of his ankles and knees were insensate. His hips ground in their sockets as against shattered glass; to exist was to know agony.

"This becoming," Thanos said. "It is an interesting thing. Who are you now, I wonder?"

"I am Loki," said Loki. "Of Asgard."

"Do not lie to me, child. Who are you?"

He was—he was— "Loki Laufeyson," said the same, "of Jotunheim."

"I have told you," said Thanos, "I will have no lies. Who are you?"

He was— "I am—I am Loki—"

"No. There is no Loki here." Thanos drew closer still. "There is only the forge of the universe, and the hammer of Thanos." And closer, yet closer. "We will remake you, Liesmith, and then we will see of what use you can be."

And then Thanos kindled a fire beneath Loki, and built a bonfire that blazed towards the stars.

And Loki _screamed_—

* * *

Did he want the throne?

Oh, he played at indifference; it was Thor who had the love of their people, not Loki, not Loki who had his books and his tricks, who hid himself away, who walked among them only cloaked, not Loki, who embraced neither battle nor his brother's games. Loki had games of his own, but they were games for one player.

Thor was firstborn, his father's son—strong, yes, and he loved with his fierce lion's heart. Thor's love was as sturdy as he and broad, too; every stranger he met was a friend. Loki, who had loved but few, was impressed and disquieted both by his brother's ready nature. Thor was the obvious, in some ways the natural choice, but Odin had raised both his sons to be kings.

Loki played at indifference. He said, I will not shun the throne, but neither do I covet it. He said this to everyone, to his father, to his mother, to the brother who was dearest friend, to the handful of scholars with whom he corresponded, even to Sif. Even to himself. This was the best trick of all—how thoroughly Loki could fool Loki, how blindly he believed what he admitted as truth to others.

But in Loki there was a thirst—not Thor's lust for glory, not Sif's for war. Loki's hunger was for a thing far simpler, a thing that made itself seem reasonable, expected, even wanted. What Loki wanted was Thor's hand, sure, as his brother clapped him on the shoulder. What Loki wanted was Frigga's respect, not for her pupil, but for her son grown. What Loki wanted was Sif's promise, a public binding of their fates. His appetite had been built by a hundred small dismissals, a thousand veiled barbs, a lifetime of walking in the Thunderer's shadow.

What Loki wanted was recognition in his father's hall.

The peace that had fallen over Asgard in the wake of Surtur's war was a fragile thing; whatever glory Asgard's armies had won, the carnage was itself a reminder of those slip-shod treaties that held the monsters at bay. Jotunheim, in particular, was a constant topic of conversation—and Surtur, and whether his defeat would hold; and, closer to home, the sorceress Karnilla, who was stirring in the east.

Loki knew of these rumors, but he was, in truth, far more interested in the gift he was about to present to Sif.

She was sitting in her chair before his fire. He had persuaded her to remove her boots, streaked with mud as they were, but the mud-streaked dog he could not convince her to leave outside, and so she sat, hands over her eyes, the filthy creature at her bare feet defeating all attempts at cleanliness.

He set his gift across her knees, and knew that she would recognize it for the weight and balance of it immediately.

"Now?" she said.

"Now," said Loki, and watched as she opened her eyes.

The sword was well-wrought, if plainer than what she carried more usually; its blade was deep silver, its grip wrapped in red leather. Loki had put no spells on it, knowing she wouldn't thank him for interfering, but he had supervised the sword's making, and before it was quenched he had whispered a wish to the hot uru.

"I know you prefer that double-bladed beast Thor gave you," he said, "but I thought, well—perhaps she would like a hand-and-a-halfer for her collection. There will never be enough blades to slake Sif's thirst for what it sharp and shining."

She was on her feet already, and as she drew the sword it rang, a low _shing_ of approval that raised every hair on Loki's hide. He watched as she went through her forms, testing the mettle of his offering, and then she smiled, pleased and ferocious, and ended in Woman's Guard, sweeping the point above and behind her until the blade kissed her shoulder.

"Loki," she said, "it's perfect, thank you."

"I am glad to have pleased my lady," he said, with a smirk and a little courtly bow, but when he rose she was studying him without glee, her gratitude lost to a frown.

"You know—" she said. "You know that you don't have to lavish me with presents to keep me pleased, though, don't you?"

"Ah, it pleases _me_ to so lavish you," Loki said. But then—he did have to lavish her, didn't he? If he didn't buy her presence with gifts and favors, he had no guarantee she would continue to find her way into his bed. It hadn't escaped his notice, how closely she guarded their liaison, when by all rights a match with a prince of Asgard should be called from the rooftops. At first he'd been thrilled to sneak around, to hide with her, to have assignations behind the backs of all, but soon the thrill had fled, leaving him weary. He was all too aware that they had made no promises.

"It pleases me," he repeated. "Now then, tell me, my lady—what will you call your sword?"

At his gesture she resumed her practice, lunging into Boar's Tooth. Her concentration was absolute, but her movements were loose, easy, as much second-nature to her as breathing. "I will call it skin-ripper," she said. "Blood-drinker, bone-breaker, carrion-crow, foe-scythe." She whirled, and cut the air; the wind from her blade teased Loki's throat. "Death-of-summer, end-of-stars," she said. "Heartbreaker."

Loki began to circle her. Her eyes followed him, but she held her guard, the naked sword in her hand as sure and immovable as stone. He held her gaze and laid his fingers on the flat, just above the guard, and then he trailed them up the blade to the point. "Should I be jealous of your pretty toy?" Loki asked, drawing the words from low in his throat the way she drew sword from sheathe.

Sif shuddered.

And, at the most inopportune of moments, his spy-glass chimed.

Loki cursed softly and turned to look at it. Sif came up behind him, standing close but not close enough to feel. "Who is it?" she said.

"A palace guard," he said. "I had better find out what she wants, hm?"

Sif shifted, bracing a hand between his shoulder-blades, and then rose on her toes to press a kiss to the nape of his neck. "I suppose so. Go and be dutiful, Odinson." And then she ruined the moment by smacking him on the rump.

Loki shot her an affronted pout—she laughed, the gladdest sound in the world—and went to answer his door. It was set already to the tower base, twelve stories below; he stepped outside and closed it to a crack behind him.

"Yes?" he said. The guard swallowed, not nervous, but not _quite_ at ease.

"Your Royal Highness," the guard said, and made her obeisance. "His Majesty the King requests your presence and that of His Royal Highness the Prince Thor in His Majesty's chambers at your earliest convenience."

Curious. "Did my father give reason for his summons?"

"No, my lord," the guard said. Her throat worked in a nervous tic.

"Very well. Thank you, you're free to go," Loki said. She bobbed her head and fled as quickly as dignity would allow. It seemed his reputation preceded him.

When she was out of earshot, he murmured, "You heard?"

"I heard," Sif said, and then threw the door open. "You can be jealous tonight," she added. "If you're jealous enough, maybe I'll even express my gratitude."

"Heartbreaker," he teased, and then he set off for the palace proper—on foot, for once, since Sif seemed content to occupy his open doorway and thereby easier means of passage indefinitely.

Thor was waiting outside of their father's study when Loki arrived. He hadn't seen his brother much of late—the dolt was always off on some madcap with his comrades, although Loki noted with private satisfaction that while his brother had been scarce, one of those comrades always found her way back to Loki. Thor was in full armor; his smile was half-hearted at best. "He would see you first," Thor explained. As Loki passed, Thor clapped him on the shoulder—comfort, no doubt, or a plea, if he suspected that one of his more hair-raising adventures had reached the ears of their father.

Odin was dressed far more plainly, in the workday robes he affected out of the public eyes; he was waiting inside at the roots of his avatar of the World Tree, his hands clasped behind his back. From some unseen vantage, one of his ravens called.

"Father," Loki said. "You wanted to see me?" He had approached on his father's blind-side; as he spoke, Odin turned.

"Loki," said the All-Father. "My son. Yes, I have news to share."

"Jotunheim? Or—surely not Surtur's forces?"

"No. Today we have peace. A restless peace, to be sure, and one that even I cannot say will last until tomorrow, but the realms are quiet. What I wished to speak of...is you."

This was unusual news indeed. "Oh?"

"Yes," said Odin, and smiled—but only, as he ever smiled, briefly, a flash of a feeling that transformed his face to the shadow of who he'd been before he, as the mortals had it, _'gave his heart to know wisdom.'_ "Yes. 'Oh.'"

Loki drew closer, brushing shoulders with his father as he imitated Odin in studying the tree. It was not quite Yggdrasil that stood here, but nor was it a thing entirely different from Yggdrasil. Not for the first time, Loki bit back the urge to reach out and touch; the spark that lived in him, the spark that had been nurtured by his own proclivities and strengthened by his mother's teaching, that spark...well, who knew how it would interact with the World Tree? He'd never dared such surrender, and if he fell into it, opened himself to the ebb and pulse that darted beneath the trunk, he risked extinction.

"Do you remember when you were a boy," said Odin, "and some foolish thought lodged in your head, and you ran away?"

"Yes," said Loki, and did not laugh. "Even Mother couldn't find me. You were away in Alfheim, but when she sent word you came back and found me in the orchard."

"Yes," said Odin. "The next time you were cannier—you left for us a falsified note asking for ransom."

"You found me in the weapons vault. You were angry because...because…"

"It happened in the midst of a memorial for Asgard's fallen. I was speaking with their families when your brother informed me you'd been stolen by pirates." Odin huffed. "Not your cleverest scheme, but you learned from it; the next time you left us only a bloody shirt."

"The kennels," Loki said. "I was hiding with the hounds."

"Yes," said Odin. "After the fifth or sixth such incident, my counsellors started to wonder if they didn't have a fool for a king. They would tell me that you were only playing some boyish prank, and advise me that I need not continually react as if you were spirited away by demons."

"But you did. You found me every time, didn't you?"

"So I did."

Loki frowned, grasping for some lesson, some point to this reminiscences of memories nearly forgotten. His father must have caught something of his expression; Odin huffed again. "There's no hidden meaning, my son—only the wandering mind of an old man."

"Not so old, Father," Loki said.

"No? But not so young, either. You were a good boy, and you are—in spite of my influence, I sometimes think—you are showing yourself a good man. I doubt you will ever be easy with your path, but you have in your way served Asgard nobly and well."

"Thank you," Loki said, but the words fell from his lips by rote. This was—he was—was Odin, _would_ Odin—?

And then Odin said, "I hope you will serve your brother as admirably as you have served me."

The numbness started in Loki's feet, but within a breath it spread to his core, to his arms, to his hands, to his head, to his tongue and lips. He was master enough of his face to hold his features in the arrangement that suggested respect and a mild curiosity, but his heart was hammering.

"This is not an easy tiding," Odin said. "It gives me no joy to give you news you would wish not to hear, but your brother will have his birthright as firstborn—and with one as perceptive as Loki at his side, his rule will be just, honored."

"Father—you always told us—"

"I did so tell you," Odin said. "And did I not vie with my brothers Vili and Ve for Bor's throne? I have made my decision."

"Yes, Father," Loki said, and he clasped his hand to his breast and bowed—but blindly, in the direction of the World Tree rather than the All-Father. His heart was throbbing in his ears, and when at first Odin's feet swam into view Loki could not recognize them.

"My son," Odin said, and lifted him up. "That your brother will rule does nothing to diminish your own accomplishments, your own character. It means only that Thor is best suited for this task, and Loki is best suited for some other purpose."

"Yes, Father. Thank you, Father," Loki said.

Odin blew out his breath. "It seems my words were sowed on stone ground," he said—and what? What new riddle, what new serpent would he hide under Loki's bed now? "I hope you will hear them and heed them all the same," the All-Father finished. "Go now. Send your brother after you."

Loki bowed again, as a dutiful son and subject must, and left without ever again meeting his father's eyes. That curious blankness held him still; he was outside of his body, linked only by that pounding of his heart.

Thor was outside, but down the hall a little way, his shaggy golden head bent low that he might converse with Sif. She had armed and armored herself since Loki had seen her last; the arms she bore were not those Loki had given her, but rather the sword and dagger Thor had presented as a gift on her nameday all those long seasons ago.

She met him with only a curt nod, not with the sweet kiss he might have expected in private. Thor appeared even more reluctant to break off their repartee, but break it off he did, and at Loki's nod he straightened himself and squared his massive shoulders.

"Father will see you now," Loki informed him, and then he summoned a smile that he hoped was not half so sickly as it felt. "Congratulations," he added quietly, clasping his brother's forearm.

Thor was at this action puzzled, but his enlightenment would arrive soon enough—in truth, too soon.

When Thor had been swallowed by their father's monstrous maw of a door, Loki let that numb void pick up his feet and carry him forward, to whence he knew not; but Sif caught him by the arm.

"Loki," she said, sharp and urgent, and then, with softness: _"Loki."_

He stilled like a snake before it struck, and in that stillness he armed himself in the mail that served him just as well as her plate. "Tell me, Sif," he said, and turned to her, a smile like a pike playing over his lips. He said, "Tell me—does your father pester you still, about your choice in husband?"

Startled, she stepped back; the hand she'd used to stop him closed into a fist.

"Does he peck at you, your father, about your lack of femininity? Does he wonder how you'll bear him heirs when, to his knowledge, you refuse to lay with a man? Does he call you ugly? Mannish? Or is he _proud_ of his blood-spattered daughter?"

A storm was gathering in her eyes, and her sword was drawn a hair's-breadth from its scabbard. "My _father_ has no say—what in nine hells are you talking—" she snarled, and at her defiance Loki pressed his attack.

"Has he made a match for you? Is there some young lord who expects Sif in his bed?"

"Yes," said Sif, _"you."_

"I?" He stepped into her, stared her down; from behind her mistress, Sif's dog whined, a wrenching, miserable sound. "No, sweet Sif, not I. What use to you is a stud too shameful to recognize in public?"

"I will strike you if you—"

"What, my lady? You'll strike me for talking to you? Or, forgive me, is it too much that I stand next to you? Am I permitted to look upon my lady, or must I avert my eyes, too?" She wouldn't strike him, they both knew that, but if Loki was going to raze the land, he would salt the earth behind.

Sif quivered under the force of her anger, an anger that ran not hot enough to blind her nor cold enough to slow her hand; she shut her eyes, breathed through her nose, turned force to mastery, and said, "You've been upset. You don't mean what you say—"

Loki threw back his head and laughed at her. He laughed at her daring, at her faith, and he laughed at himself, at his own howling heart. He laughed until he drove her away, until his laughter lost the edge of hysteria, and then he slid down the wall and hid his face in his hands. When Thor emerged Loki cloaked himself, disappearing into the gold-filigreed stones of the wall. He sat there, on the floor, invisible, long past nightfall, and then he picked himself up.

He straightened his cuffs and righted his collar.

He went to the vault of the armory.

And there he opened a door to Jotunheim.

* * *

Loki screamed.

He screamed. He cried. He begged. He offered himself to Thanos. He offered Thor; he offered Odin; he offered his mother. Thanos built higher Loki's pyre, and Loki offered the Casket, he offered the Tesseract, he offered knowledge, he offered power, he offered service and treasure.

Thanos fed the fire, and Loki screamed; Thanos stoked the fire, and Loki offered Sif.

When he could withstand no more, Thanos would bank the crematorium, and then they would talk. "You sound like a praying child," Thanos would say, and Loki would shut his eyes. "Is there so little steel in Asgard's princes? Death doesn't want you any more than your father did—than either of your fathers did."

Loki heaved. His face felt brittle, his hair had been—had it all been burned away? He could smell it, the acrid tang of singed hair, the roasted pork of his own flesh. His blood was at times red and at other times a sharp shock of cerulean, dripping like savory juices into the fire.

He parted his cracked and brittle lips. Tried to speak, fell into a fit of coughing that split his sides. Tried again. "What...is it…_you_...want?"

"A better question," said Thanos. "Have you considered that you've already given me what I want? That what I desired were the secrets known only to Odin's spare son?" Loki didn't answer, and Thanos laughed. "You did think of that, child, and yet you told me anyway."

Loki, who could no longer feel his feet, who had already committed treason, was less concerned with what he might or might not have let slip.

"Child—little brother." Thanos stared up at him. "Little brother, your people call you a monster, and you ask what _I_ want?" Those saturnine lips peeled back from his teeth in a gruesome mock of a smile. "What I want—that depends on the man asking. Tell me: Who are you?"

"Nothing," croaked Loki.

"And from what land comes Nothing?"

"Nothing of...Nowhere."

Thanos nodded, as if the creature above him was only now accepting some universal truth it had long denied. "Nothing, of Nowhere," he said. "I find myself in need of a vanguard. You seem to be well suited for the purpose. Will you accept?"

The creature, who found the agony without meagre against the dark hole beneath his bone cage, stared.

"I should tell you—whether you accept or not, that has no bearing on how much pain I will continue to inflict. Cooking you, that's slow and crude. I have more sophisticated methods."

And the creature hissed, "What's...in it...for _me?_"

"For _you?_ Child, you are a piece of work to make sick men whole. Ally yourself with me, and you will rule."

"What...land?"

"I have an eye for what your people call Midgard," said Thanos. "The realm called Earth."

The hanging creature knew this for a lie, or at least for an incomplete truth, but it opened its mouth anyway and partook of Thanos's fruit.

_"Yes,"_ it said.

"Well then, my vanguard." Thanos stroked the creature's cheek, ran his thumb over the creature's face until crisp flakes of skin drifted away. "I think I'll call you...Loki."

"Call me whatever you like," said the vanguard of Thanos; and it summoned a black smile, and reminded itself, if futilely—

That Thanos was not the only serpent in _this_ garden.

* * *

They named him monster, and so he was.

Whatever love he bore for his brother, for his mother and father, there would forever after be this between them. No—there had _always_ been this, and only Loki had been too stupid to know it. There was no going back, no return to happy ignorance, and not for the first time he wondered why it had seemed a right thought to enliven his brother's coronation.

Because oh, of course _Loki_ knew best, of course _Loki_ understood Asgard in a way Odin could only dream—

He waited outside the chamber where his mother tended his father, and none dared approach, not that Loki would have seen them if they did; his forehead was pressed to the cool gilt of the door, and his eyes were closed. He saw so little.

None dared approach save Sif, and she spoke to him softly, brought him a goblet of wine, offered her outrage and her empathy. Her eyes were red, but her cheeks were dry; whatever fragile equilibrium they'd found after Loki lashed her with his tongue, he had not again earned the right to see her cry.

When she spoke to him, he turned his face from her, and when she reached out to clasp his hands, he pulled back from her and snarled.

"_Don't_ touch me!"

"Fine," she said. "Fine." She left the goblet on a nearby plinth; it remained there, untouched, long after Frigga called Loki into the room—and longer still, until, incredulous and desperate, pleased and empty and wild, the ruler of Asgard emerged from his father's room and drained it to the dregs.

It was nettle wine; there was no mead for the first toast to the new king.

Very well, thought Loki. They named his kind monster; he would make sure there were no monsters left, and then Odin could decide where Loki's allegiance lay.

Sif came to him later in private, of course, after that contemptible display at the foot of the throne; she found him in his tower, searching for a manuscript on the Destroyer armor, uncaring of the mess he made in his search when he'd soon move to the palace proper.

"Loki," she said. "Will you not restore your brother? _Bring him home_. However much you covet the throne, I know you love him."

"Of course I love him," Loki said. "But what use is love—_don't touch me._" She'd reached for him, as she had a thousand times before; but Loki yanked his arm from her grasp with enough force to send the both of them staggering. "Don't you—don't presume to treat your king with such casual liberty."

"Do you even want the throne?" she snapped, shoving herself off from his desk and sending a cascade of notes and letters to the floor. "Or do you only want Thor not to have it?"

"I didn't do any of this for the throne—"

"But you betray your brother anyway! It means little that you do it out of spite rather than ambition. Loki, these are not the actions of a good man—a good king."

He bared his teeth in a wolf's grin. "When have I ever been a good man?"

"Not now," said Sif. "I begin to wonder if you ever were, now that I see how easily you throw away your family. Have you forgotten your mother?"

In that infinite, hanging moment of time, he hated her. He hated her for coming from so little and making of herself so much; he hated her for her sureness, for the pureness of her blood and of her will.

"Fetch Thor yourself if you love him so much," Loki said, turning away, "but know that it's treason if you do."

"I never claimed to love Thor in the way that you think I love him! Are you so blinded with envy of your brother that you cannot see—"

Loki returned truth and falsehood in equal measure: "You were right to keep this tryst of ours a secret," he said, and laughed. "Sif. Oh, Sif. Do you honestly believe that any son of Odin would ever want so base a wife?"

"I was content to be your partner, and have you as mine. Now I know you no longer love me. The Loki I knew is dead."

"Love? I love you exactly—_exactly_—as much as you love me." He turned on her, half-mad with delight to say so many things that had gone so long unsaid.

"You risk the whole realm for your tantrum!"

"I risk nothing that Thor has not risked himself," countered Loki.

"Don't speak to me of Thor." He wondered if she would strike him, if he could goad her that far; her temper was high, but it took more than that to draw the battle rage from Sif. Maybe she'd run him through with her sword, and then there'd be no more of Asgard's foundling king. "Don't you dare. Thor would never banish you—"

"Thor. Always Thor. Thor, Thor, Thor." Loki drew the metamorphosis from his eyes out and back and down, weaving together the fibers of himself, tweaking here or there a thread; his shoulders widened, his sinews strengthened, his hair turned fair. "Is it Thor you want? Here he is." He spread his hands, let her look at his changed body, let her see how exact a duplicate of his brother he was, and then he bent to kiss her.

The force of her blow to his breastbone rattled him despite his new bulk, and the novelty of his laugh surprised him; he sounded neither like Thor nor like Loki.

"Prince of Lies," she spat. "So now you'll touch me?"

"Is it lies you want?" said Loki. "You're strong, Sif. You're beautiful." He let the enchantment fade but slowly; his hair darkened to raven, his face became lean. "You have the truest heart of any warrior in the Realm Eternal—nay, of any in _any_ realm, and this son of Odin would have been proud to stand as your husband."

Her stare was heavy, and for the first time in his memory he could read nothing in her face; the arrangement of her features was as foreign as a dead tongue.

"We are autumn and winter," she said at length. "I should have known nothing good would come of our union."

"And I suppose your love for Thor is a spring love?"

"My love for Thor is no longer your concern." She stepped around him, taking pains not to press against his side in the narrow corridor between work-tables, but her hair brushed his collar all the same.

"When next you see me," Loki said, "you will address me as your king."

"If it please Your Majesty," said Sif, and her voice was as cold and hard as her eyes; as hard as bone, as hard as bedrock, as hard as uru from a dying star.

* * *

Thor would not have broken.

Thor would not have broken, but Loki did break, and after he'd broken and they'd cut him down from the tree, he was insensate for days. Sometimes they fed him, or gave him water, or rubbed salves into his skin until it peeled away and left him pink and raw; they did nothing for his mind.

He dreamed that his father visited him. He dreamed that Thanos came, and split him open. He dreamed that he heard Thanos talking to some other, and in the dream Thanos said, _He lies and kills in the service of liars and killers. He pretends to be separate, to have his own code, something that makes up for the horrors; but there is no code to make a clever fool wise, no wisdom to turn a craven heart whole._

_He was a god,_ said the other. _But a coward, like the humans you promise us._

_Perhaps,_ said Thanos. _As I was, I might have feared him. As I am, he is but one more monster in the dark._

_Like yourself, my lord?_

_No,_ said Thanos. _I _am_ the dark._

Loki dreamed such dreams.

And his body knit itself back together, and in time there came a scepter, and a toy; there were foes and tricks and long, long games.

And one day Thanos said to him, "My vanguard. Are you ready?"

"Yes," said Loki.

"Then, I think, it is time for you to express your true nature."

"My nature?" said Loki, and he laughed wildly, desperately, as though Thanos had relayed a fine and rare joke. "My nature?" he said. "No. This is my _choice._"

* * *

They clashed on Heimdall's bridge, and the force of their battle was enough to shake the worlds.

They clashed on Heimdall's bridge, one light and one dark, one treasonous, one righteous, brother against brother, as Jotunheim quaked below them, and in the end, when Thor flung Loki from that bridge into the abyss—

In the end, Loki opened his hand and slipped of his own free will from Asgard's grasp—

No. In the end, it was more instinct than reason; he wanted the void, yearned for the void, knew only that oblivion would be preferable to the crushing fate of a failed traitor—

In the end, the truth is this:

He fell for a long time.

* * *

**End notes: **The story summary comes courtesy of Louis Glück. I'm pretty sure I lifted "Odin's gaping eye socket" from Walt Simonson, but I could be recalling that incorrectly.

Loki quotes from Ecclesiastes 1:17:

_And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit._

Thanos paraphrases Shakespeare's Julius Caesar:

L. _What's to do?_  
B. _A piece of work that will make sick men whole._  
L. _But are not some whole that we must make sick?_  
B. _That must we also_.

I don't know why I thought I could get away with that!


End file.
